


The Cave of the Lions

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, F/F, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Horror, Major Character Undeath, Mystery, ritualistic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-11-11 09:59:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11146140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: 40,000 years ago nameless artists painted the cave walls in black and red. Aurochs, bison, deer, wolves, bears, leopards, hyenas - and above all, lions.Today, two friends on the brink of a new relationship take a holiday to southern France. For both Laura and Carmilla it is the chance to be alone and see who they might become together. For Carmilla it is also a trip back to the half-forgotten country she spent her childhood in. But as the setting grows more and more familiar and as some of the locals seem slightly too welcoming, she begins wonder what kind of things she has forgotten and what she might need to remember before it's too late.





	1. Pompe

_“Alouette, gentille alouette,_   
_Alouette, je te plumerai._

_Je te plumerai le cou,_   
_Je te plumerai le cou,_   
_Et le cou, et le cou,_   
_Et le bec, et le bec,_   
_Et la tête...”_

Carmilla crushed one ear into Laura's hair and wished the damned _alouette_ would damn well run out of things to be damn well _plumerai'd_. The mother in the seat next to her had apparently no other songs in her repertoire that would sooth her miserable baby on this bumpy descent and the pilot was taking his sweet time about finishing it. They were up to verse number thirty-seven and she couldn't get her headphones out because Laura was sitting on them and Laura was far too cute when she was sleeping to be disturbed - even when Carmilla’s need for something angry, existential and punk-rock was as extreme as it now was.

There was a lurch. Somewhere below the wind was pulling up from the Ardeche and they hadn’t yet dropped below the turbulence. Carmilla steadied herself on the armrest automatically, but there was a chorus of exclamations in mixed French and English from the less hardy fliers. The baby continued to cry and found an echo from further back. Two men in the seats in front of her raised their voices even more lest their important conversation be interrupted. The hairs on the back of Carmilla’s neck rose. Times like this she wanted to bare her teeth and hiss. Instead she did what she always did and closed her eyes, folding her free arm in against her chest and straightening her back so that she sat without slumping. Breathed in. She sat and endured, Laura still fast asleep by her side.

It was worth it. Would be worth it once they’d landed and everyone else had gone away and finally left them alone, after all the waiting she’d done these last three months. A small price to pay for a holiday in Provence with her, with her... well, perhaps it was better to just say 'with her Laura' at this stage and avoid getting too sentimental at the words. A year of friendship increasingly tinged with something more. That something more was what this holiday was for figuring out, when it came down to it. Because with her normal impeccable sense of timing, Laura had decided that the evening before a three-month internship on the other side of the Atlantic was the perfect moment to broach the subject of whether Carmilla "might like to, sometime and there's no, like, pressure but I just thought that maybe you might kind of have been wondering too about potentially starting to see if being a _thing_ was, oh fuck, I am romantic kryptonite." And granted there had been eventual kissing once that syntactic jungle had been navigated, but then Laura had gone off to New York for ninety-seven days and Carmilla had stayed behind at the older York.

So after spending the first two months brooding through her research and imagining every possible domineering but sexually intriguing editor or dashing fellow journalist with a secret identity Laura might even now be falling for, Carmilla had suggested an immediate get-away for the two of them, scheduled to leave the day after Laura had got back and hugged her dad. Laura had jumped at the suggestion with an immediate enthusiasm. There had been hearts in her email and Carmilla began having hopes for an easy resumption of the desperate kissing and lusty sexual undertones they had parted with. Except of course Laura was now horrifically jet-lagged and had fallen asleep during the safety demonstration she was normally the only one to listen to.

Light flooded the cabin, the sun slashing through the windows as they turned. The plane banked, swung round and the hills rose up below the tilted left hand side so that even Carmilla could see them over the other passengers’ heads when she cautiously opened her eyes. Yellow-brown rock smudged with deep grey-greens, harsh light and strong shadows. She had been born somewhere in that dappled landscape, but the cramped window and the people in the way meant craning her neck to try and see more was futile.

There were nerves in her belly and she did not like it. Back in the grad students’ common room at university, Elsie had made a mock pouting face at her announcement of the holiday and informed her with pretend petulance that if she wanted to get laid she didn’t need to go all the way to France to do it. She had made some biting come back – _Well I wouldn’t bother if it were just you, sweetcheeks_ – and got the expected grudging laugh. But occasional study buddies were one thing; Laura quite another.

Eventually the purgatory came to an end. The plane touched down and people began immediately scrabbling out of their seats to stand waiting, even the ones too tall to stand upright under the luggage compartments. One especially towering girl with red hair had to bend almost double. Carmilla rolled her eyes at the folly of tall people and woke her fellow short creature.

“Cupcake. We’re here.”

“Hmm? Carm? Right. France.” She yawned and struggled with her seatbelt. “That was a quiet flight.”

“Uh... yeah. Here, let me,” and she hoisted Laura’s bag on her free shoulder as she fussed around with clothes and purses. The jumper with an owl on it was abandoned in the warmth.

Carmilla bought her a coffee, something strong and syrupy. Laura drank it in silence, but it seemed to have its effect because when they stepped out of the terminal building to the warmth of the late afternoon, her grogginess fell away and she took Carmilla’s arm. Her eyes were bright again and her smile came out. Golden light spilling off her hair and even amongst the petrol fumes of the carpark there was a touch of resin from the hills. Carmilla managed to stop frowning.

“Home again.”

* * *

“Does it look the same?” Laura pressed her nose against the window and looked out at the landscape. The sky was beginning to grow dim, throwing shadows across the garrigue. The taxi had left the lights of Aix-en-Provence behind now and the road was winding up into the hill country. They crossed a river far below.

“I... I don't know, actually. I don't really remember it well from this kind of view.” Carmilla shifted in the seat beside her. “You know how it is, when you're young you look at things in a different way. It's our house and garden when I lived here that I remember.”

“You were what, eleven when you left?” The idea of an eleven year old Carmilla seemed a contradiction in terms to Laura. She was half convinced the woman had popped into existence just as she had looked on the day they first met – grouchy, shy, nose in a book and giving off an air of weary distaste for the idiocy of the world. She was beginning to suspect that at least part of the weariness was probably an act.

“Ten. I went to live with my father for a bit in Austria before he sent me to school.”

Laura opened her mouth and then shut it again. Avenues of conversation and appropriate times.

“So what have we got planned?,” she asked instead. “I've left it all to you,” she added, enjoying Carmilla's mildly panicked expression at the prospect of actual responsibility. “You're the one who knows the place and who didn't have to work twelve hour days right up to the day before yesterday. What schemes have you got up your sleeve?”

“Oh I have all sorts of trouble planned.” Carmilla waggled an eyebrow and got a gentle smack in return. “All right, all right. So there's the caves – people come from a long way round to see them, so that's a highlight. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been down them, they’ve only been done up for tourists in the last few years. And I thought we could go walking. It's a regional park, so there are good trails and I'd like to see some of the places I used to go rambling. Other than that I wasn't really planning on an action packed couple of weeks. Just... you know. Spending time.”

“Spending time.” Laura felt her smile come through at the promise in Carmilla’s words. “I think I might like that very much.”

The taxi climbed into the hills on the northern side of the river, rounding a ridge so that even craning her head Laura could no longer see the glow of the big city's suburbs on the coast. But the dark ahead was short-lived as they burst through a scrubby wood into a cluster of smaller lights: the town of Actée and their hotel.

“J'ai réservé une chambre?” Carmilla said to the receptionist. “Carmilla Karnstein. Une chambre pour deux,” she added and tried not to look at Laura. The choice of rooming arrangements had been the cause of much anxiety, but the prospect of actually asking Laura for guidance even more cringing. At least with study buddies you didn’t have the _uncertainty_.

The man checked the book, nodded and handed Carmilla the key to their room. “Your room, mademoiselles.” Not a flicker on his face.

“Miss Carmilla Karnstein.” Laura's nose pressed against the back of her neck and the hairs rose. “Just the one room?”

Carmilla felt the blood in her cheeks. The man behind the desk wore the carefully not-listening expression of true hotelier.

“There are two beds,” she muttered in her defence and felt Laura's delighted giggle through her top. “But I can get another room if you like. I didn't want to... be too distant. I just thought it might be-”

“It is. And you're cute when you're being presumptuous. No reason for all this twitching.” A brush of lips against the nape of her neck had her almost forgetting to pick up her bag.

“There’s no twitching,” she grumbled on the way up the stairs. “There is an absence of twitching.”

Laura giggled. “Race you?” Carmilla raised an eyebrow and let her dash off. She followed behind at a more dignified pace but nonetheless beat Laura in on account of actually having the keys.

There were indeed two beds, separated chastely by a nightstand. The balcony was small but looked out onto the square from a beautiful viewpoint. The church across the road glowed and the flagstones were dotted with people gently drifting, nowhere in particular to go. The scent of the hills was closer here, dust and wood, herbs and the tired day.

“Carm.” Laura took her by the shoulders and swivelled her round to that they were facing. “Thank you for this.”

“Oh, it’s-” Carmilla ran out of words and planted a kiss on her cheek instead. They stared into each other’s eyes. “Any time, cupcake.” The tension tightened. Laura swallowed.

“We should go to bed.”

“Uh.”

Colour rose to her cheeks. “I mean our beds. We have separate beds. I mean, I can go to my bed and you can go to your bed.” Laura’s voice started accelerating, apparently with no input from her brain. “Or the other way round, if-. No, I mean. And like, I meant bed bed, not bed, not like that, I mean, not that that would be a bad thi- no, but not yet – ah. Meep.”

“Impressive communication skills, cupcake.” That sounded harsh. She thought quickly. “Should we-?”

The question hung in the air.

“Tomorrow, Carm. We’ll talk about stuff tomorrow. Right now I need to -” the yawn beat her to it. “Sleep. Coffee wearing off. Not sure I’m up to the, you know, feelings talking. Timezones are weird.” She was drooping already, the energy of the journey from the airport deserting her. To her surprise, Carmilla found herself relieved. Sleep was creeping up on her too.

Curled up in her own bed, Carmilla dreamed she entered a church. It glowed softly in gold and red, deep shadows filled with warm browns. On the walls bright images, figures haloed in gold. Letters in something like Greek, or Russian, but she could not read them. There were people gathered to either side who looked at her but she did not look at them. She went to the altar, and before the altar was a low wide vessel set on the ground, full of water glinting the candles' reflection. She stepped into it with bare feet. People came from behind her. Hands held her by the shoulders, pressed gently against the small of her back and they were warm against her bare skin. They grasped her limbs, ran over her neck, tugged at her hair. She did not see faces, only the shadows of people moving. She sank into them and they laid her down in the water.

Laura’s dream grew from the room. Carmilla’s slowly breathing form in the next bed warped and shifted imperceptibly until she became a girl in a white nightdress. The girl on the bed stopped looking like Carmilla, but try as she might Laura could not summon up the name of the one who lay there instead. She lay quietly staring at the ceiling as slowly blood began to seep up from the floor. It filled the room until it was a ocean. The girl's eyes were open and she never moved her gaze from the ceiling, mouthing silent words. Laura could almost make it out: “love will have its sacrifices”. Or maybe not “love”, maybe “life”. She leaned closer, but suddenly there was something behind her and she could not turn, something purring the words: “curiosity killed the cat, darling.”

* * *

The cafe smelt of coffee and chocolate, fresh croissants and the hints of soap and wet hair coming at Carmilla from across the table. The lines of sunlight on her pale hands made slash marks.

“So Cat – she was my editor, you remember? – she was brilliant. Terrifying, but brilliant. Had this whole junior reporter bootcamp going. I told you about the story on the man in the mayor’s office taking bribes and how she got three of us to do the story from three different angles because he wouldn’t recognise any of us-”

“You mean she took advantage of your youthful inexperience to send you into potentially dangerous situations?” Carmilla put in. Her heart wasn’t really in the sarcasm. The Lois Lane junior gig was actually pretty endearing - and in the grand scheme of investigative journalism, bureaucratic fraud was a lot less worrying than some of the horror stories she’d imagined about mob bosses and speakeasies and whatever else you got in America. She tore into a croissant, dipped a corner in her hot chocolate, and let Laura’s animated chatter fill her morning.

“Okay, I know she wasn’t just doing it for me. She had a paper to run! But it was great all the same. And we got our names on the byline, so CV-boosting, right?” She glanced down and frowned. “What _are_ you doing to your breakfast? Anyway, where was I? So Kara and I got him telling two complete opposite lies to each of us on records and _boom!_ Front page is ours. Well, front page of the business news in the city edition. But the front of that.” She beamed and waited for admiration.

“Well, will you look at that. Laura Hollis, cub reporter.”

“It was nice to finally get out of that hamster ball that is local papers. And now I’ve got that under my belt-”

“Big time.”

“Ex- _ac_ tly.” Laura proved the earlier skepticism of the waiter wrong and did indeed eat the third croissant. “Anyway, how’s the grad student life been treating you? You said you’d chosen a title?”

“Maybe.” Carmilla wobbled her hand. “I don’t know. I mean, by the time I’ve chosen what to call it I’ve basically decided what the conclusion will be, right? Not sure if I should tie it down this early.”

“You’ve been doing it for a year.”

“I know, I know. When I’m ready, creampuff. Anyway. _Issues in the Modern Uses of Greek Mythology As Moral Tales_. Something like that. Or. Maybe not..?” Laura’s expression had not been encouraging. “Needs some fizz?”

“ _I Read All of Camus And All I Got Was This Stupid T Shirt._ ”

Carmilla reached out and flicked her nose, receiving a squeak of outrage in reply. “Rude, Hollis.”

“Anyway, you can’t tell it like that, like it’s some boring history lesson.”

“It _is_ a history lesson, creampuff. I’m doing a PhD in history. That is in fact very much the point of the thing.”

Laura twitched suddenly. “Well, _you're_ on someone's radar.”

Carmilla leaned forward and cocked an eyebrow. “Oh am I, Miss Hollis?” She caught Laura's expression. “Oh, you didn't mean yours. Where?”

“Seven o'clock. Don't look now! But– yes.” She went pink and hurriedly fixed her eyes on the watcher instead of Carmilla’s face. “Now.”

Carmilla followed Laura's gaze. On one of the table at the edge of the cafe’s street enclosure, lounging over the rail, was a black woman in a burgundy blouse and impossibly precise make-up. _Lacquered_ was the word that came first to her mind. She was spinning her coffee cup around on her saucer and contentedly watching people passing along the street. As Carmilla continued to watch the woman, she turned back to the girls' table and met her eyes. She held it until it had gone on too long to pretend it was accidental.

“Are we doing something odd?” Laura hissed. “Is this not how you eat croissants? Like, am I supposed to be doing the dipping in drinks thing?”

Carmilla watched the way the woman looked slowly down at her nails, inspected them, and then returned to meet her eyes again as if confident they would not have wavered. “She's familiar... have we seen her somewhere?”

“ _I_ haven't.” Laura sounded mildly suspicious.

The woman suddenly broke into a broad smile and pushed back her hair. She sauntered over with the body language of one sure of her welcome.

“New faces in town,” she said. “How delightful. Here on holiday? Charming.”

“I suppose tourists must be in short supply here,” Carmilla said dryly, indicating with a wave the rest of the cafe full of people clutching guidebooks and cameras.

“Oh, but so few of them interesting, darling.” She held out a manicured hand. “Matska Belmonde. Call me Mattie.”

Carmilla took it hesitantly. Laura’s handshake was so brief it looked like she’d burned herself. “Why are we so interesting?”

“Oh, you know. A girl gets a sense for these things.” She somehow managed to shrug and make it look elegant. “And what do you call yourselves?”

“Carmilla. This is Laura.”

“Enchanted.” Her tongue appeared at the corners of her mouth. “Visiting, ah, family by any chance?” The intonation was odd, an implication of significance.

Laura glanced nervously at Carmilla. She had gone paler than usual at Mattie’s words, but then flushed pink. “No. Not at all.”

“Ah? Well.” She seemed disappointed, as if she had expected a different response. She turned to leave, but halted at once and turned back. “Carmilla. Carmilla what?”

She would have considered lying, but the question took her too much by surprise. “Karnstein.”

There was a momentary drop in Mattie's facade. It was covered up almost as quickly, but the split-second of realisation registered before it was replaced by the former satisfaction. “Karnstein,” she purred. “Of _course_ you are. Do enjoy your stay, darlings.”


	2. Temenos

Carmilla's memories of the bright stuccoed town were hazy at best and mostly from a vantage point of three to four feet off the ground, but it was not a difficult place to navigate. A central square with three radiating main streets, a couple of distinctive side squares, and a small formal park. All sunshine, all chatter of conversation in the air and whenever the streets were aligned right a sight of the rocky hills shot up into the blue sky. And although Actée was not large, the famous caves and the surrounding _Parc Naturel régional_ attracted enough visitors for it to support its very own tacky souvenir shop. Carmilla had to haul Laura away from it, arguing that it was absurd to be buying “I Heart Provence” t-shirts when she had only just arrived.

“ _You_ could get one, then! And then I could wear it.” Laura’s wide eyes warred with Carmilla’s principles. “You've been here enough to earn the right.”

“Not for years, cupcake.”

“Your French is holding up, anyway.”

“Hardly. I've got a Parisian accent now. Worse than that, I've got the accent of an English girl who learned Parisian French. We'd better not meet anyone who remembers me, they'll be horrified. Besides,” she added, suddenly aware that she had barely spoken of large parts of her past to anyone, “Maman spoke Provençal at home. Some of the older families did.”

“You mean like the ones who'd been there for generations?” Laura asked and got a nod in reply. “That's really nice.”

“You think so?” Carmilla asked, with a sideways glance.

“Yeah! I mean it would be cool to have somewhere like that, where you just stayed and grew into your home. And you knew everyone. Dad and I moved round so much, you know? Amsterdam and then Canada and then Chelmsford. And _then_ London, and then York for university. So I never got to stay anywhere for very long. It'd be good not to move away from friends every few years.”

Carmilla remembered the dislocation that had followed her mother's death. The lawyers had packed her off to Austria and Switzerland to stay with her father. There followed a few awkward months trying to read his baffled expression when he looked at the daughter he'd never seen before and whom, she supposed, probably looked rather too like the ex-wife he’d prefer to forget. Then it was the boarding school in England - always with some educational summer holiday with acquaintances planned to keep her from having to visit him in Graz or Geneva for more than a fortnight a year.

“What do you reckon about the woman at breakfast?” Carmilla asked when they had found a place to sit in the park and eat cheese stuffed into baguettes. Her – Mattie’s – face had been hovering at the back of her mind. It was not unfamiliar somehow, but still no spark of recognition had made itself visible.

“Dunno,” Laura said through a full mouth. “Thought we were someone else? Strong signal on the gaydar produced a welcoming committee from the local lesbians? Happy to see a sunbeam of a pretty girl? Plus one dark cloud of a grouchy girl as well, of course.” Carmilla made a impressively grotesque face back and she had to clap her hand over her mouth to not giggle the bread out. She made grabby hands at Carmilla's bag just out of reach, wanting the lemonade.

Carmilla emptied it onto the ground to find the bottle and cups amongst her notebook and the obligatory two books she never went without. Laura helped herself to a drink and inspected her reading material: one fat novel probably full of dour Russians arguing about God, and one serious formal tome, _Actaeon in Art History_.

“How do you have a book on art history without any pictures?” she wanted to know after flicking through with an expression of skepticism.

“Academic publishing, cutie. Budget's a shoestring and even then these things cost a bomb.” Carmilla looked ruefully at the overpriced raw material for her thesis. “But hey, it's an excuse to go all over the place visiting art galleries. I'd been saving the ones in London for when you got back,” she added gallantly.

Laura squeezed Carmilla’s knee. “Is Actaeon the one who turns into a spider?”

“Arachne.”

“Right. You’re the classics nerd.”

“Oh come on.” It was their standard argument, always worth retreading. “No worse than pop-culture nerd. Who was the third companion of the third Doctor?”

“Sarah Jane Smith.” It was out of her mouth before Carmilla had even finished asking. “All right, _nerd_. Story. Actaeon. Amaze me with your Greeking.”

“Okay,” Carmilla began, and Laura drew her knees up to her chest. “The story goes like this. Or one of the stories anyway, because there are several. You know Artemis? She's like the Greek Diana? Or well, Diana is the Roman Artemis, because Artemis came first.”

“Sure. Distant relation of Wonder Woman.” Laura nodded with authority.

“I won't even ask. Anyway, she does her thing up in the mountains. Running deer and the cypress trees are sacred to her. _Artemis Agrotera_ , Artemis of the wilderness. _Potnia Theron_ , the Mistress of Animals. That’s an old title, goes way back long before we even hear the name of Artemis. She has the moon in her hair and she carries a bow and hunts with her companions – Kallisto and Atalante and all that lot. All women.”

“As you would, given the choice.”

“As you would. No men allowed. She was death to anyone who offended her – of whom there were a surprising number, actually. So anyway, there are different versions of the Actaeon story like I say but the most famous one is written about by Ovid. He's Roman, but he- actually, doesn't matter. Ovid. So in his version, Artemis is bathing in a lake in the woods when along comes Actaeon. He's a hunter too and he's got separated from his hunting dogs. And he pulls aside a branch and there she is naked in the water. Big mistake. He gazed upon what he shouldn’t.

“She changes him into a stag as punishment. So when his dogs, all panting with the chase, finally catch up with where his trail led there's a great big stag instead of their master. And they go for him. He runs, but doesn't get far before they catch him and tear him into pieces.

“So ends the tale.”

Laura chewed it over. “Remind me why you like this sort of thing?”

“I dunno. You never wanted to turn irritating dudebros into deer and have them slaughtered? That big puppy who follows you around, maybe?” Laura squeaked a defense of her friend Kirsch and Carmilla grinned fiercely. “So: afternoon. Want to go see the caves today?”

The Cave Museum was only a mile from the town, and a well-cleared path over the scrubby hillside led straight there between juniper bushes and expanses of wild thyme. There were neat post markers with red bands all along the route and every so often a little board in French commenting on the landscape and how it related to the caves. The one at the top of the hill from which Laura and Carmilla looked down to see the car park and museum building on the other side showed a sepia photograph of pair of young women in bonnets and drab clothes.

“The discoverers of the caves,” Carmilla read out. “Marcela Roqueta and Bernadette Delpastre were hunting for flowers in the summer of 1872 when they found a small cave with a number of what looked like crude pictures of animals. They noted that it seemed to go deeper but did not venture further until a week later when they returned with lanterns and discovered the fabulous Actée cave system.”

“'Hunting for flowers',” she said, and raised an eyebrow. “Sure they were. Hey Laura, I want to go find some flowers, so let's ignore everything in full view out here and go find somewhere _really hidden_ where nobody will see us.”

Laura looked out over the hillside. Here and there hardy bunches of white and yellow and pink between the rocks – she didn't know the names of those, but there was lavender as well, clinging to the sunny patches between those small spiny oaks.

“We're not exactly short of flowers.” She stooped and plucked a five-petalled pink flower out of a spreading bush and tucked it behind her ear. “How do I look?”

“Perfect.”

Tourist season was in full flow when they made it down the other side to the wide valley where lay the caves. A group of schoolchildren milled around by their coach shouting in German and to Carmilla's relief were shuffled back onto it for their onward journey. The attendant at the desk greeted them in English, blushed when Carmilla replied in French, and waved vaguely at a symbolic clock indicating the time of the next English-language tour.

There was a small museum set out around the entrance to the caves themselves and they wandered in. “The caves at Actée,” Laura read out from a board daubed with a huge photograph of a black mouth in a sun-bleached hill, “were occupied approximately forty thousand years ago by the Aurignacian culture. At this time, Europe was in the grip of the Würm glaciation, the glacial period that preceded the current Holocene epoch.”

“I think I understood some of those words,” Carmilla said.

“Are you doubting my ability to explain Stone Age archaeology, Carmilla Karnstein?”

“Never. Do go on.” She tucked her chin onto Laura's shoulder.

“The Aurignacian culture was the first material culture of modern humans to enter Europe and their remains, tools, artworks and even musical instruments are found all over the southern half of the continent. However, it is the cave paintings that have most impressively preserved the memories of these pioneers, and nowhere more spectacularly than here at Actée.”

“I bet they say the same at Chauvet. And at Trois Frères.”

“Shh, she’s listening.” Laura cast a glimpse back at the attendant on the other side of the room.

“Well, we’ll have to see for ourselves, won’t we?”

Laura found a small figurine of a cat in one of the cases and giggled in glee for a few minutes. “Haven’t you ever been here before, then?”

Carmilla shrugged. “Don’t know. Not that I remember. But all this visitor centre stuff is new, it was probably a lot less open to the public back in the good old days of 2003. I don’t remember ever being taken, anyway.”

They gathered at one end of the foyer at shortly before half past two. There were a few people already there - a bored looking mother listening to her highly enthusiastic boy tell her all about mammoths. A pair of serious young men with light beards talking in quiet American accents. A thin young woman in precise clothes, fiddling with her cuffs. She caught Carmilla and Laura’s entwined hands and smiled.

“Two thirty tour!” announced an approaching young woman in khaki shorts and a glossy black ponytail.“ _En Anglais_ ,” she added to an elderly looking couple looking out from the museum.“Anyone else coming?” A few hurrying figures appeared out of the museum sides and she counted them up. “Good. It's about an hour down there, all right?” She eyeballed the boy, who nodded and shuffled impatiently. “My name's Semirah. I'll be your guide today. Is anyone here claustrophobic?” Nobody put their hands up. “Good. You'd be amazed who that doesn't occur to.”

She lead the way down a corridor and out the back of the building into the bright afternoon sun. The door opening caused alarm in a nearby bush which vibrated with a flock of little brown birds taking wing. The entrance to the caves was set into the hillside, a wide awning over it and security fencing around – sensitively done, but it looked shackled to Carmilla, as if the museum was there to keep it chained up and safe. Amongst the blindingly pale, almost white rock, the blackness was sharp and watchful. Semirah unclipped a walkie-talkie from her belt. “Hey Mel. Going into the pit now.”

“Bring me back something nice,” came a mocking reply in crackled static.

“Yeah, you wish.” Semirah spun on her heels and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, safety talk. It's pretty safe down there as long as you don't do anything stupid. Stay on the walkways or the sand-covered floors. Move slowly. If I'm going too fast for you, say. We keep the caves in darkness as much as possible. The pigments have survived so long only by being kept away from bright light. Follow the guidelights on the walkway and be careful not to trip. When we come to each gallery, I’ll turn on the lights there.”

Laura smiled at Carmilla in excitement and the group funneled into two abreast as they stepped into the caves. At first it was merely dim in the overhang, then they turned a corner and darkness folded over them. Semirah switched on a small torch and pointed it at the ground in front of her.

The walkway was stainless steel grille, held off the floor by an inch and edged with railings. Along the sides were thin, pale luminescent strips like the aisle guides on an aeroplane. The ceiling was low enough that the Americans, the tallest of the group, had to stoop but Laura and Carmilla walked comfortably below it. The air cool and damp and everywhere in the darkness the sound of slow water dripping. The smell of mud and wet sand. Breathing. Laura’s hand curled tighter around Carmilla’s.

The walkway ended abruptly and there was sand underfoot.

“Everyone still with me?” the guide asked from the front. “We're coming into the first of the public galleries now.” She found a box soldered onto the railings, flipped the cover, and pressed a button. Low level lights held in brackets on the floor and railings turned on. They cast light from below, reddish like the aura of sunset.

The immediate impression was of size, more size than they had expected from the cramped tunnel. The chamber opened wide, as large as a double-decker bus and with more caves leading off into the interior of the hill with mouths exhaling cool air. All save the way forward and the way back were sealed behind mesh screens damp with condensation. The walls of the chamber met high over their heads, arching like a cathedral vault with ribbing of half-joined stalactites running down the sides. The sand under their feet was damp and the prints of their feet made sharp shadows.

“Wow,” someone said. Nobody else spoke.

On the wall facing out of the hill, deer were leaping. They came from left to right, made of smooth confident lines without detail but with unconstrained life. A great stag led the way, black branches flowing up into his antlers. Below them were ranged smudged people, dartlike dashes thrown from their upstretched arms to pierce the flanks of the animals. Carmilla found herself waiting for them to move.

“Forty thousand years old,” said Semirah. “The black is charcoal. The red is ochre and the brown umber. Those are pigments found in the lowlands several miles away. All brought here for this.”

In the depths behind them the air turned over and the sound of distant hoofbeats arose, half in the mind and half out of it.

Carmilla tucked herself as far back in the cave as she could to try to take in the whole scene. There seemed too much of it, it was too stark. The confidence of the lines, the sparseness, to make a deer out of a dozen curving strokes and no more. Like the white horse that she had seen carved into the Oxfordshire chalk, like forms arising from Cubist texture, like the outlines of muscles moving under the skin of a galloping animal. The inevitability of a print left by nature.

Laura let go of Carmilla’s hand and came to the wall. She trailed fingers on her palm behind her and hardly noticed her boldness. The wall pulsed in the soft red light, blood in the stone brought to the surface in gashes. Nothing to add or take away, and she looked back to see the same resolute completion in the shadows of Carmilla’s enraptured face.

The group moved on with hardly a word. Semirah took them into the dark again and turned into the hill. There was a passage here with brighter lights, no pictures on the wall to worry about protecting. It narrowed, and off to the left were pitch black windows through which came the sound of water.

“Only a small proportion of the caves are open to the public,” she said. “But even of those that aren’t, only a small proportion of those have been explored properly by archaeologists. Caves are strange. The largest passage can suddenly stop; the tightest squeeze can suddenly open into a huge room. For instance.”

The wall ahead of them seemed to end in a sheer wall. Semirah lifted her torch and showed how the way was blocked. Then she directed the beam to what looked like the smallest crack. She turned sideways, slipped in between and after hesitation, the first visitors followed. The space twisted and the wall did not block after all, only folded over itself like curtains. The shadows hid the entrance as if it were a ripple in stone.

“The Great Gallery,” the guide announced when everyone had made it through and huddled around her, unsure of where the edges of the room where. She pressed for the lights and there was gasping.

The walls were right in front of them and covered in lions, dark outlined muzzles crowded against each other like a line-up. Carmilla stood back and saw how far up they went. She lost them in the shadowed roof. As her eyes adjusted again she could see how behind the sharp black lines were smudged outlines of earlier drawings now painted over, so that the lions on the surface emerged from a background of cats.

There were lying forms and standing forms, hunting and roaring, but for the most part simple profiles pushed so close in against each other that they almost seemed to tessellate. Carmilla could believe that they went on forever, that lions ran through the hill and deep over the surface of the strata into the stomach of the earth.

One of the American men asked Semirah, “What were lions doing here? Wasn’t it too cold in the Ice Age?”

“Not for these,” she said. “We think of lions as hot weather animals because in historical times they were found only in Africa and southern Asia, but the cave lion subspecies covered Europe and northern Asia. And not just lions. Hyenas,” she shone her torch, “and leopards.” The pale beam marked out a hulking, ungainly hyena and an unmistakable leopard, finely spotted in umber.

“Why no manes?” asked the boy.

“Well spotted! We think maybe cave lions didn't have manes, because they are never shown. Of course, it's also possible that only lionesses were depicted. Remember that in prides of modern African lions, only the females hunt and perhaps that caught people's attention back then.”

“The girls hunt?” He looked amazed. “Cool.”

Laura gave him a mental thumbs up for that remark. It helped. She was beginning to feel uneasy. Not the caves themselves, but the presence of the paintings. It was one thing for there to be an empty hole in the hill, but this wasn’t an empty place. It was full. The cave was full of being. She insinuated herself against Carmilla and wrapped an arm around her waist.

Carmilla’s focus was on one particular lion on the wall at eye height. It had been painted onto a raise in the surface and the artist had carefully tilted their picture so that the edges of the animal’s muzzle brought out the contours of the wall. The heavy jaw stuck out and cast a shadow. In the half-light and the constantly shifting shadows thrown by people moving back and forward, the lion was moving, stretching out in her home inside the wall.

Laura’s hand around her waist poked her. They were moving on. Semirah was already around the corner and saying something about the next gallery. They hurried to catch up with the group – one of the American men had stood at the corner and watched to make sure everyone was through.

“And here,” Semirah focused their attention on a wall and switched on the next bank of low lights as those in the cave of lions behind them clicked off, “we have the first partial self-portrait. But only partial.”

The wall had a row of three handprints, outlined in red ochre. The hands stood out pale against the dark halos that surrounded them. One much larger than the others.

“Artists would place their hands against the wall and blow pigment onto the surface. Whether straight from their mouths or through a blowpipe we don't know, but examples of this have been found not only all over Stone Age Europe, but all over the world in dozens of different settings.”

Laura reached out with her own hand towards one of the two smaller paintings. She made eye contact with the guide when she coughed and nodded, but let her hand hover a few inches over the damp cave wall. The handprint was a fit for her own.

“The human body has fairly consistent proportions,” the woman with the neat clothes said softly in an Australian accent. “You have the same size hands, so you are probably the same height. Look down at your feet. It is where she stood.”

Laura dropped her gaze. The floor was the same packed sand with the light prints of shoes as that all of the other chambers, but for a moment her imagination filled in bare footprints underneath her own. The group stood in silence, listening to the echo of frozen time. It reminded Carmilla of a church.

“Everyone with us? There’s one more room before we take a right turn and come out again.”

Carmilla knew what to expect before the lights went on. Her dream of the last night came back to her. It didn’t help. She felt roaring in her ears at the sight which grew and grew as her eyes adjusted and the full scale of the last room revealed itself.

There were hands. Every wall was covered. They crept up the ceiling, disappearing into the darkness. The walls were pressed by overlapping hands. Everywhere was the shadow of someone and the newer hands covered over the older hands, hands on hands, hands pushing the walls outwards, hands uplifting the ceiling, hands pounding the floor, hands large and small, hands pressing against her, hands on her arms and on her chest, hands thrusting and striking and Laura trying to hold her up as she sagged to the ground shaking from their impact.

Hands were on her face, warm soft hands trying to guide her, but it was no good because of all the others. They were older and stronger. Something primal, like a growl or a roar, crept up from the back of her throat as the noise of footsteps running on the metal walkway vibrated through her. People were shouting. The chamber was full of ghosts and there was no room for Carmilla. She cowered from the hands.


	3. Hieros

Carmilla awoke wrapped around Laura. The morning air was already hot and muggy and she felt grimy. She was in her own bed and still in the clothes from yesterday less her shoes. This was not quite how she had imagined waking up with Laura in her arms, not least because of the pyjamas with cute owls on. They were not unbecoming.

Last night was blurry. She remembered the cave, the start of the panic attack or whatever it was. Then it had been a fever dream of roaring mouths until she woke up in what looked like the staff break room at the museum. There was a paramedic, but he had apparently already judged her to be in no further physical danger and was conferring with Semirah the tour guide. He drove them back to the hotel and she must have fallen asleep while Laura was getting changed.

Laura stirred gently, let out a sigh. The clock said it was eight in the morning and there was movement from the floor below. Suddenly it was imperative that Carmilla get up before she be seen. She hid in the shower - a habit she’d learned at boarding school, a place to talk to yourself where nobody could make out the words even if they were in the next room.

“Fuck’s sake.” She leaned on the tiles and turned the heat up as high as it would go despite the day. “Fuck’s sake. Fuck’s _sake_.” There was the muffled sound of movement in the bedroom when she punched the wall, so she refrained from doing it again.

Apparently it was panic attacks now. Fucking embarassing. The mirror showed the grazes on her jaw from scraping against stone floors and the shower hadn’t released the dragging tension from her shoulders. She dressed quickly and prepared to face it all. It naturally got awkward. Laura was solicitous and concerned; Carmilla quiet and sullen. It took a certain amount of silent pained smiling for Laura to leave her alone long enough to get herself ready and then they had to have the conversation.

Carmilla looked at the ground. “I’d kind of like the morning on my own, actually. After yesterday.”

Laura looked stricken. It took her a while to reply. “If you want.” Unhappiness was tight in her voice.

“It’s not- I just don’t think I can cope with people at the moment. Even you,” she added, and tried for the ghost of a smile behind the tension. “Hit me pretty hard yesterday.”

Laura fiddled with the curtains and looked out on the street. “Do you – do you want to go home?” She held in the next sentence and then it all came out in a rush, “because we could. We could do this another time if you’re not ready. Or not at all,” she added quietly.

“No!” It came out more panicked than she intended, but Laura seemed reassured by that at least. “No, I just – need a few hours. Can we just do our own things this morning? Meet here and go for lunch?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Do you want to work here? I’d like another look round the town,” she offered.

“That’d be good.”

“I’ll be back at one, then.”

“This isn’t really how I pictured our mornings, cupcake.” The small blush on Laura’s cheeks was no compensation for the self-inflicted disaster.

As soon as she was gone, Carmilla sat down and started hating herself. Laura had just wanted to help. And yes, she would probably have spent the morning snapping at her if she had stayed, but how much worse could that have been than bundling her out of the door to go play like she was a child and the grown-up was working? She had probably sounded like a condescending standoffish bitch. It was only serious luck that Laura hadn’t reached that particular conclusion a year ago.

Although to be more accurate, she _had_ reached that conclusion but then miraculously they had become friends anyway. So maybe there was hope for a second recovery.

She found her folder of work and laid it out on the table under the window. Not that she had much hope of doing anything particularly worthwhile, but she had chosen the subject because it absorbed her and anything to take her out of herself was what she needed. There was value in having something she could think about endlessly without becoming bored.

The church across the street had its doors open and there were people inside. Not many, this was a quiet Mass for the particularly devout a Wednesday morning, but enough that Carmilla could pick out the shufflings in the back pew as the congregation got up and down at the appropriate points. She tried to remember if she’d ever been inside. Maman had never gone and she couldn’t imagine her bringing Carmilla along for a token baptism. There were few people on the street to make other noise and if she concentrated she could hear the faint echo of the priest declaiming.

_Take this, all of you, and eat of it:_   
_for this is my body which will be given up for you._   
_Take this, all of you, and drink from it:_   
_for this is the chalice of my blood._

She shut the window and tried to bury herself in her books. The question before her was one of appropriation. There was a thesis in it somewhere, if she could dig it out. People read myths and used them for their own ends. Camus marched Sisyphus up his endless hill pushing his absurd boulder. Freud explained men by means of Oedipus. And then they read back into mythology the meanings they had found there. Sympathy for poor awkward Hades. Odysseus the existentialist hero, navigating amongst the sirens of bad faith. So then what was the point if you wrote your conclusion back into your premise and then drew inspiration from the source you’d created for yourself? It was circular. There was what Kierkegaard had said – that the only thing you could get out of reading a book was what you put into it in the first place.

And yet people went on, drawing new meanings out. Sometimes it felt like a fever dream, the same characters occurring in endlessly varying circumstances. Somewhere in the kaleidoscope was a kernel, that spurred people to draw from _here_ rather than _there_ and the way in which they interpreted and reinterpreted was the key. It all seemed a bit much for one thesis. But then it all seemed too little too, when her advisor was gently suggesting that having a chapter outline might be a good idea at this point and while of course he wasn’t _concerned_ yet, it had occurred to him to wonder if she needed any help.

After one hour and twenty minutes without Laura and three checkings of her phone, Carmilla decided this was intolerable. She grabbed her shoes and headed for the streets.

* * *

Laura paused twice on her walk and considered turning back. Carmilla was so damned obvious. It was always her thing, again and again, to push away when she felt vulnerable. She had lost friends because of it and you couldn’t always blame them. The woman could be an uphill struggle. Probably it was unacceptable to grab your… whatever, your broody possibly-girlfriend, grab her by the collar and demand she stop deliberately being a martyr but it did sometimes seem to be the best option. Yesterday had been new, though. Regular brooding, that would be because it was Tuesday. A certain amount of anxiety and need to be alone, that would be the emotional pressure of coming home to a now partly unfamiliar place along with someone she was struggling to express feelings for. But complete meltdown and panic attack when she’d never had a touch of claustrophobia before – that was new. That was specific. That was _triggering_.

So: Carmilla didn’t want to deal with her shit? She had three hours in town to go investigating. First stop was tourist information. There was apparently a museum in town, a more generalist affair than the cave-focused exhibition centre from yesterday. The young man at the desk told her that it did have some galleries nonetheless and was a bit ‘less for the coach tours’ with a certain snobbishness.

She sought it out, a great stuccoed building out back of the church, some former aristocrat’s house with high ceilings and far too many rooms now filled with the detritus of centuries.

The museum seemed vaguely to go backwards. The first room was full of photographs of sharp-eyed men and women dressed casually and carrying guns with quiet competence. Captions recorded Nazi strongpoints sabotaged and prisoners rescued. She flitted through as fast as was decent and hoped the more serious visitors would forgive her not wanting to see that today. There were more modern displays after that, uniforms of colonial troops and maps of the industrialisation of the south coast. Back through the wars of Napoleon and of the kings before him. The maps starting shaking apart, the clearer borders replaced by more hesitant lines and hatched colouring. An orange hole appeared nearby. She worked her way through the Middle Ages and watched even the idea of France falling away. Yellow crosses covered the maps of the hill country, Jewelled reliquaries shuffled uncomfortably against rusted swords.

New cities – old cities – then, with stone and statues. The grave markers of legionaries, bright tiles from mosaic floors. Wine jars in great cabinets all the way up the walls. The Roman province ( _Provence_ , she noted and felt a twitch of smugness) faded imperceptibly into the Greek colony clinging to the thin coastal strip, and around it the half-known, half-imagined people who wrote their forgtotten languages in Greek letters. Obscure fragments in rusted iron. She started speeding up. Bronze. Stone.

The final suite of rooms all radiated off one central hall dominated by a diorama in a glass case of the cavern site. It had been cut away so that the individual chambers could be peered into. In the microcosm was the cave of the lions, the chamber of hands, all the little rooms they had passed through and all the little ones that had been cordoned off. She leaned over it, resting her weight on the case and lifting her heels off the tiled floor.

She picked one doorway at random. There were neat modern displays, well-lit insets with big colourful boards next to them. Beads, small bone flutes, carved figures. Some of them were marked with the names of other cities, quietly announcing them to be replicas of orginals held elsewhere. Apparently there were not enough ancient relics to go around. She wondered whether that meant there were rooms like this all over Europe, all showing the same copies of the same items with only one real thing in each. A hypnotic half-man, half-deer stared at her with wide eyes and she positioned herself to not see it.

One extended display was of depictions of lions. There were photographs of the walls she had seen yesterday, robbed of two-thirds of their power in their paper and ink versions. There were sketches of other artworks from other places from Spain to Russia. All red and brown, all confident flowing lines and the heads of animals. There didn’t seem to be many people, but in a brightly lit glass box was a figurine that she thought was human before she looked closer. Elongated limbs were cut with the grain of the ivory and were splitting with age, but the shape of the person was clear. Their head was the head of a lion, their arms ending in clawed paws. One of them was raked by deep perpendicular scratches.

“The Loewenmensch,” she read. “The oldest anthropomorphic figure known in all art history, from Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany. The original is in Ulm. Like the caves here at Actée, it is of Aurignacian age.”

There was a knocking as if on a door and Laura turned to find someone leaning against the nearest cabinet. Today she was in black but there was no mistaking her.

“Ms… Belmonde.” Belmonde smiled wider, the cat that got the cream.

A little moue and a dance forward. “Mattie, please. Actually - I’m glad I caught you again.” She touched Laura on the forearm as if the two of them bumped into each other regularly and she had been expecting it. She said so.

“That’s the second time you’ve appeared all acting like we know each other.”

Anyone else would have blushed and felt out of place. That was standard behaviour in an interviewee when you caught them out. But Mattie just smiled as if she were awarding points.

“Well you know, I rather think I do. Your little ‘Milla, anyway.” She drew closer and tapped a fingernail familiarly on the glass over the lion-headed person. Her perfume smelt of money and good taste. “Grew up round here, didn’t she?”

“Yes.” Laura thought about the previous day and understood without needing to ask. “You knew. You knew as soon as she gave her name.” And you’re playing some game with us, she did not say.

“Naturally. Lilita Morgan – briefly Lilita Karnstein of course, and not briefly enough if you ask me,” a contemptuous roll of the eyes, “her family and mine go way back.”

Vague and airy. Not a good source unless pressed. “How far back?”

“Back. But my my, hasn’t Milla grown into a lovely woman? I always knew she would. Her mother was a great beauty.”

Laura tried to count in her head. If Carmilla had left when she was ten – so thirteen years ago now – then she supposed Mattie didn’t look too young to remember Carmilla if she had been fairly young herself. The story stacked up so far, or at least it wasn’t impossible. “Why didn’t you say?”

“Hmm? Well, one doesn’t want to spring these things all of a sudden. I thought I’d arrange a welcome gift first.” She paused for gratitude and applause. “Don’t tell her, though – it should be a surprise.”

“She doesn’t like surprises.”

“Indeed?” Mattie seemed more amused than discouraged.

“And you… just happened to be in the museum today,” Laura ventured, trying to hint indirectly.

“Oh, I pop in all the time. It’s a place to connect.” She moved in front of Laura to stroke the glass front of a case of clay figurines. “It’s important to have a place to relate to, wouldn’t you say?” In the cabinet, vague shapes of clay women stared back at her.

Laura suppressed the comment that Mattie looked more like the kind of person who would flit from Paris to Milan without a second thought. “And that’s here?”

“The past is a place too. Are you interested in these things too, little one?” Her wave took in the stacked artifacts.

“Kind of. I mean, I don’t know much, but yesterday-”

“Yes indeed. Yesterday. See this.” She spun Laura imperiously by the shoulder and steered across the room. “Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. It’s much later than our caves – only ten thousand years old or so. But quite, quite lovely.”

The clay figurine under the glass was small but massive. She sat – lounged, reigned - on a throne whose arms ended in snarling leopards’ faces. Her eyes were dark pits, the folds of her flesh heavy.

“There she is.” Mattie looked at her fondly. Her voice purred softly. “Ten thousand years ago, the woman on the lion throne. Eight millennia later, the Anatolians still worshipped Cybele, the great mother of the mountain, the mistress of animals with lions at her feet.”

“Are they the same?”

“Hmm. Well, let’s see.” Her mind appeared to drift for a moment and she softly but firmly took hold of Laura’s chin to tilt her head this way and that. Her inspection apparently to her satisfaction, she continued as if she hadn’t paused. “Let us say that where there is a true source there will always be manifestations.”

“That sounds ominous.” She stepped back. “I think I’d best be getting back,” she decided without looking at her watch.

“Three hours is a long time to be apart.” Mattie chuckled at her flush. “Off you go, gidget. I shall see you again, of course, when it’s the right time. Give Milla this.” Out of her light jacket she drew an envelope and pressed it into Laura’s flinching hand.

“Um. I will.”

“Ciao.” She tapped Laura on the cheek and withdrew in a rustle of silk and confusing perfume.

* * *

Laura paused outside the hotel room and let her hand hover over the doorhandle. Unsure of her welcome, it took her a few seconds to turn the handle.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Wow. That was unexpected.”

There were flowers. Yellow gerberas propped up on the table, white snapdragons carefully wedged in amongst the light fittings, even a circle of blue sweet peas arranged on a bed. The room was lit up with everything Carmilla had found in town in the short time available. In the flowered circle was a basket overflowing with coloured tissue paper and inside it a pile of pots and jars and fresh bread and fruit and-

“-and ludicrously expensive champagne, _where_ did you even find that?”

“I have my methods,” Carmilla said, forebearing to mention the obvious fact that they were in France. “It’s my apology for this morning. And thanks for yesterday. And just because you look cute when you’re lost for words. I wasn’t sure what you like,” she added in explanation of the excessive variety, “so I just got a bit of everything.”

Laura bounded forward and kissed her on the blushing cheek. “No apology needed. I’ve already forgiven you. Now, more important matters.” She dug into the basket and turned up paper cups. “We have work to do.”

Work was done. Ten ounces of pate and two glasses of champagne did wonders to put the day on a new footing.

“Strange thing,” Laura said carefully when the general air had settled into restful contentment and dozing was happening. “I went to the museum and bumped into that woman again. Matska Belmonde – the one from the cafe.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She, uh, she said she recognised your name.”

Carmilla rolled over and faced her. “My name?”

“Hmm. Karnstein. Said she knew a Lilita Morgan who was married to a Karnstein for a while.” Laura dangled her hand off the edge of the bed to rootle around in her bag for the envelope.

“She knew my mother?” Carmilla was giving her her full attention.

She handed the message over. “Apparently. Said to give you that. It was… kind of freaky, to be honest. I don’t think she was telling quite the whole truth.” Carmilla tore the envelope open with such speed that if there had been a letter inside it would have ripped.

Instead it was a photograph, creased in the middle but despite the dog-eared corners not at all old. It showed a patio and a small collection of people sitting in wooden garden chairs. There was a radio on the table, and glasses of something fizzy. Matska Belmonde was there, beaming on one side in a sundress. There was a heavyset old woman lurking part-way in the shade and making an expression of good-humoured grumpiness. And there was a beautiful red-haired lady sitting in the third chair, one hand steadying the shoulder of a small girl. The child’s hair was black, but the unreadable expression in the eyes was the same as in her mother’s.

Laura looked at Carmilla not looking at her. Her eyes were on the woman holding the child.

“Carm?” She didn’t respond. “Carm? It’s you, isn’t it? The girl.”

“I don’t remember.” She breathed it, not as a reply to Laura but as her own response to the faces. “I don’t remember this. Yes, it’s me. And Maman. And...”

“And Mattie. And – is that your grandmother?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t have grandparents. Not on Maman’s side anyway. I never met the other ones till I went to live with Father. I don’t – I don’t understand. How is it me? How is she there?” She seized Laura by the wrist. “What did she say, Laura? What did she say?”

“Just that I should give you this. And that she knew your mother.”

“And that’s it? That’s all she said?”

“Yes! I’m sorry, I didn’t ask more-”

“-it’s okay. Sorry. It’s fine.” She touched the cheek of the girl in her flouncy skirt and dust stained trainers. “But I don’t remember this.” She shot a glance sidelong. “Is it like that for everyone? Do people remember what they did before they were ten?”

 _Don’t you know?_ Laura wanted to ask, but this was Carmilla. She had never talked about her own childhood until very recently. Probably she had never asked anyone about theirs, either. That was sad – although there was a part of her obscurely proud that she was the one Carmilla had managed to open up to.

Carmilla was waiting for an answer. “Um, some of it.” She cast around. “A lot of friends. People I used to play with. Favourite toys. Some books. I don’t really remember Dad’s friends,” she added, as if that helped.

“And your mother?”

“I was six. It’s blurry sometimes, but... yeah.”

Carmilla made a face and touched her forehead to Laura’s. She turned the photograph over in her hand and came up short. Wordlessly she handed it over.

_Avant le baptême._

“Before the… baptism?”

“Yes.”

“Were you-”

“Not that I remember.” She frowned. “Maman wasn’t religious.”

Carmilla twisted the picture in her finders, Laura watching the tension in her neck and jaw. But then an expression passed over her tight face, something curious. She met Laura’s eyes and placed the photograph deliberately back in its envelope. This she carefully tucked on her bedside table underneath her bottle of water. She rolled back onto the bed to lie very quiet and still at Laura’s side, their bodies touching almost imperceptibly, and closed her eyes.

It seemed a very good idea.

It was only as she was drifting off to sleep too that it occurred to Laura to wonder whether the writing on the back of the photograph was old or new – that it might not be a label from when it was printed, but something Mattie had scribbled on today.


	4. Stoa

They climbed amongst holm-oak and thyme. The sun was strong even though it was not yet noon and Laura was glad of the extra water in her rucksack. The valley lay behind them in baked beige and dusty blue-greens. Sharp shadows twisted on the ground.

“Carm, how do you not burn?” she grumbled. “You’re paler than me, you should be frying.” Carmilla’s pale skin was untouched despite her desultory use of suncream. Apparently it messed up her eyeliner if she used more. Laura had slathered it on but was acutely conscious of the spot on the back of her neck that she’d missed rapidly approaching medium-done.

“Good genes, creampuff.” She grinned. “Cupcakes: bake for twenty minutes at 200 degrees, then ice.” She found the bottle in her rucksack and chucked it in Laura’s direction.

“Ha bloody ha.” She made good her bare patches. Carmilla’s eyes stayed on her as she rubbed the stuff into her legs. She knew it, and Carmilla knew she knew it, and she knew Carmilla knew that. All that morning she had been aware that they were both counting down and wondering when zero would be. Nothing had happened yesterday afternoon except eating and napping and getting up for a light dinner somewhere shadowy off the main square, but some kind of barrier had been crossed nonetheless, some wordless admission had been made.

“There!” She wrinkled her nose as Carmilla flicked a stray dollop off it. “I shall no longer combust like a vampire.”

“All those Draculas turning to dust just needed some Factor 50, then?”

“Absolutely.” Laura put on an air of authority. “You grow up with a massively over-protective dad and you soon learn all the things about suncream. Did you know that many creams do not block Ultraviolet A and may still leave you vulnerable to melanoma and photodermatitis?”

“Well, isn’t that something.”

“I’m fairly sure I knew how to say ‘melanoma’ before ‘biscuit’.” She sighed ruefully. “But I missed his safety assessments when I left home for the first time.”

Carmilla dropped off a bleached stump and the two continued in their way upwards. The valley holding Actée was behind them and some way ahead was _La Dent del Gat_ , the Cat’s Tooth, a ragged arrangement of peaks that was the centre of this small cluster of hills. Not high and not far, but a popular goal for hikers nonetheless. It jutted into the sky, one larger point flanked by two smaller one, a molar rather than a fang.

The ground dipped and a small stream ran across a ford. It was hardly worth the name, a couple of feet wide and no more than an inch deep. The water on their boots left prints and they merged with those of somebody who had crossed before them. These no longer stood out as drops of water, but of darker earth not yet dessicated by the sun.

“Come on, detective skills,” Carmilla said. “Show me. Do your Sherlock Watson thing.”

“Not a lot of footprint tracking in modern journalism, Carm. Disappointingly.” Laura squatted down nonetheless, enjoying the game. “It was rather more ethics courses and discussion of the many meanings of the phrase ‘conflict of interest’.” She bent her head. “ _But_ I did have the _Junior Investigator’s Handbook_ growing up and it just so happens we have a woman and a dog. The dog went ahead of her. You can tell the dog because it’s not wearing shoes,” she added helpfully.

Carmilla bent down next to her. “How do you know it’s a woman?”

Laura laid her own diminutive boot next to the faded track. “Like the Australian girl in the cave said, the human body has fairly consistent proportions. There are guys who are five feet two inches, but how many?”

A nasty smile appeared on Carmilla’s face. “And how do you know the animal’s not a wolf?”

“Well, it’s not going to be that because there aren’t any-” she stopped. “Oh my god, are there wolves round here?” Carmilla nodded seriously, trying to keep the twitch of amusement closed off. “Oh, I am so glad my dad doesn’t know. What do we do if we see one?” She stared at Carmilla, half thrilled, half horrified.

“Relax, cupcake.” She enjoyed the way Laura looked with wide eyes. “There’s like one per hundred square miles or something.”

“Are there bears? He tried to get me to take bearspray to America, I swear he thinks New York is next to Yellowstone.”

“No bears. Nearest are in the Pyrenees. Or possibly in the gay bars of Marseilles. So I shall have you back to the cautious Mr Hollis all in one piece. Come on – upwards!”

The path widened as the big shrubs with crossing branches gave way to small shrubs and the two walked side by side now. Carmilla was watching Laura with a private smile.

“Would you _like_ to be surprised by wolves?”

Laura laughed. “It’d be something to write home about, wouldn’t it? Or bears, though I’d keep that one to myself for Dad’s sake. But a bit of an adventure.”

“Laura Hollis, lady adventurer.”

Laura avoided the obvious rejoinder that this was clearly a synonym for ‘raging gay’. “Don’t you think it would be cool, though? Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

“You feeling the call of the wild, cutie?”

She stuck out her tongue. “You were the one who spent the other afternoon reading up on Artemis and her bevy of mountain women.”

“Oh, I got plenty more tales.”

“Like?”

“Like… let’s see, Kallisto. She was the daughter of Lykaon.”

“The one with the snakes?”

“That would be Laocoön.”

“Right.”

“Lykaon was king of Arcadia. He was… well, he was a werewolf at one point, sort of. Basically the Greek werewolf. But before that he had a daughter, who was so beautiful he gave her the name Kallisto. She became one of Artemis’ nymphs.”

“She was a lady adventurer is what you mean,” Laura put in with an eyebrow waggle. Carmilla gave her a soft cuff around the shoulder.

“The plot demands it. Because Zeus decided to have his way with her, as Zeus does. And how did he do it? Why, he turned himself into the form of Artemis and came on to her. And apparently Kallisto didn’t find this in the slightest bit odd and everything went swimmingly.”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “Urgh, that’s creepy. What a _dick_.”

“Tell me about it. Anyway, I’m told a nasty side effect of having sex with men is you can get pregnant. And she did. Artemis was pissed, somewhat unfairly. So she turned Kallisto into a bear.”

“Uh, bit of a non-sequitur there, Carm. And doesn’t that seem a touch on the victim-blaming side?”

“Yeah, not massively feminist of her. Dropped the ball there. But she kept the child – his name was Arkas and he gave his name to Arcadia.”

“So it ended happily after all?”

Honesty warred with pleasantness. “Not really. His grandfather Lykaon killed him on the altar of Zeus for some fucked-up reason. Cooked him and served him up as a meal in some versions. But Zeus saw what he’d done and turned him – Lykaon, I mean - into a wolf. Then he put Arkas back together again. _Then_ Arkas got to be the Little Bear in the stars and his mother the Great Bear, which is as close to an agreed compensation deal as you got back then.”

“I thought that was the guy with the grapes who did the cooking of his sons? Telemachus?”

“Tantalus?” Carmilla pulled the mental index cards out. “Yeah, he cooked his son Pelops in a stew for the gods, but they spotted it and sent him to Tartarus for punishments every bit as poetic as Sisyphus’. Pelops got put back together out of all his pieces too, except for his shoulder because Demeter was a bit slow on the uptake and had already eaten it. Hephaestus made him a prosthetic one out of ivory.”

The path turned up a pile of stones and Laura skipped up it so she could offer Carmilla an unnecessary hand up.

“So Lykaon’s the Greek werewolf?”

Carmilla leaned back in her ascent and made Laura shriek as she almost got toppled forward. She clambered back up with smugness. “More or less. There’s one other named one. See, they made a festival in Lykaon’s honour. It was called the Lykaia, imaginative naming being their strong point back then. People weren’t always very ready to talk about it, but apparently all the young bros got together once a year and had a big stew of lamb. Well… mostly lamb.”

“Mostly lamb?” Laura looked mildly queasy.

“ _Mostly_ lamb. Apparently. And some poor sod would, naturally, end up eating one of the pieces that _wasn’t_ lamb and then he was turned into a wolf for nine years. Happened to a dude called Damachus once.”

Laura fixed her with a serious face. “Carm. I respect your belief that all this is culturally important and whatever but I ask you in all sanity: what the actual fuck?”

“Hey, if it made sense to me I wouldn’t be studying it. Watch out!” she cried suddenly and Laura jumped. “Lykaon’s coming to gobble you up!”

Laura stuck out her tongue.

* * *

“So where’s your old house?”

Carmilla shrugged, not so much out of ignorance as dismissal. She waved at the approaching Cat’s Tooth. “Over the other side. It’s not there anymore. I asked Father about it when I turned eighteen and he said it had been sold to some prospective vineyard and knocked down years before.” She pursed her lips. “He hadn’t even mentioned it until I brought it up.”

Laura’s eyes held sympathy. “I’d have wanted to see it.”

“Yeah. Well, me too, but I don’t think he did.” She squeezed Laura’s shoulder so that she knew the sadness was all right to bring up. “He really hated my mother. Like, really hated her.”

“After the divorce?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. And I think he hated her for dying too, because it meant he had to have me. And then maybe he hated her because dying meant he couldn’t even hate her properly, I don’t know. We didn’t talk a lot. Don’t,” she corrected. She had last spoken to him at Christmas, a five-minute phonecall.

“What happened between them? Do you know?”

“It’s… you know, it’s strange. I don’t remember ever asking her about him.” She frowned. “Mind you, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, as you can see. Didn’t go to school. I don’t remember any friends. I may not have understood that anyone was missing.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

“Oh come on, it’s not that unusual. You were homeschooled for a bit, you said.”

Laura made a face. “After Mum died Dad really didn’t like letting me out. But that was only for a year and then he started getting better.” She nodded firmly, then something caught her eye. “Are trees meant to shake themselves?”

“Not typically.”

By the side of a half-dry streambed was a cluster of bay laurel trees, enduring the dry summers by sinking their roots deep into the gravel. The crown of one was shaking as if in a great wind and as they got closer, someone half-way up it let go and jumped back to the ground. She landed smoothly, pulled her long black curls out of their band and wiped her forehead before noticing Laura and Carmilla. Sleeveless top, muscles.

“ _Bonjour_.” She was holding a handful of twigs and leaves cut from the tree and was stuffing them into her bag when something occurred to her and she switched to English. “Hang on – it was you at the caves. Day before yesterday. You had the,” she mimed curling into a ball, “freak-out.”

“Uh.” There didn’t seem to be anything better to say for Carmilla. Strange women holding sickles distributing reports on her psychological difficulties was not something she had planned for. Laura however seemed to recognise the woman.

“Hey! Hey. It’s… Mel, right? Semirah’s friend?” Mel nodded and Laura explained, “Mel did the shouting at people to stop panicking and get their act together. It was kind of impressive.”

Carmilla could well believe it. “Well – thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. You’ve recovered then?” Mel stretched. She had a tattoo of a black horse on her left shoulder.

“Yeah. I’m peachy. Laura’s been taking good care of me,” and despite her internal cringe at the line, Laura’s beam of pride and Mel’s grudging look of approval were good to behold. Polite conversation was not her strong point and the silence went on a little too long before Laura took pity.

“Your day off? What were you doing up there?”

Mel kicked her bag behind her. “Getting some bits together.” It was dismissive. She waved at the tree. “Uh... decorations. You know. There’s a club I’m part of and the boss lady’s decided we’re throwing a special dinner.”

“You came all the way up here to get a centrepiece?”

“It’s traditional. Laurels, you know. You’ve got to have holly at Christmas, you’ve got to have laurel leaves for our thing.” She shoved the sickle into her belt and nodded at the peak leaning towards them. “Anyway, I’ve got to be getting on. Give my regards to the hill.”

“What kind of club has a _boss lady_?” Carmilla wanted to know when they were out of earshot.

“Could be a political thing?” Laura suggested after a moment’s thought. “Or maybe a charity, you’ve got to have a big name to organise fundraisers and that sort of thing.” She looked up. “How far to the top?”

“Quarter mile?”

“Race you.”

* * *

The Cat’s Tooth stabbed the sky. The central peak only became truly steep in the last hundred yards, but worn steps carved into the living rock showed them the way. At the top was a jumble of stone roughly piled up in a cairn. Laura reached the summit first, power-walking rather than running after the ascent, and found one that had rolled away from the heap. She replaced it and the hill grew another inch.

“Where’s the town?”

“Can’t see it.” Carmilla was breathing heavily with her hands on her knees, not used to the exertion. “Behind that fold somewhere.” She straightened up.

Actée itself lay hidden, but the coastal plain beyond it was visible, shimmering vaguely in the heat haze. A smear of smog and concrete was Marseilles and beyond it the smudged sea, too far away to be glittering. Somewhere in the wide sky above a buzzard circled with eyes on the ground. Behind them more hills, ridges stretching east to west, packed in rows.

Laura tried to imagine this place forty thousand years ago. There wouldn’t have been an ice cap here, of course, but it wasn’t that far from the Alps and the glaciers there would have been long indeed. Something pretty cold anyway, frosty ground and thin grass like the tundra of the far north today. She tried to see it under the hot day. Bilberries and juniper, but then there was juniper here and now since it lived everywhere. She looked at the stone below Carmilla’s boots. There was a hairline crack in it. She knew the caves at Actee were miles off to the south, but what else might there be down that tiny fracture? There were other caves in these hills, other holes where water disappeared into the dark and arose transformed in new places. They had seen a spring on the way up here, bursting with unexpected life out of a joint in the fabric of this dry hillside. Were there silent mammoths drawn fathoms below her, undiscovered lions sleeping under her feet?

She felt vaguely silly and tried to lighten the beating in her heart. “We should have brought a flag. Claimed this hill for ourselves.”

“We’ll plant an invisible one,” Carmilla grinned. “People won’t see it but it’ll be there. And we’ll stare them disapprovingly for trespassing.”

Laura mimed shoving a pole into the ground. “It’s ours now.”

“Ours.” Their eyes met and held the smile.

Carmilla squatted down on the earth. She took a handful of dust and ground it between her palms. This was how she remembered it. The scrubby land out behind the kitchen garden where Maman let her play as long as she never went out of site of the gate. The taste of the air on her tongue was the same: resin, wood, the ever-present baked dust and the dessicating wood. She stood up and leapt smoothly onto the highest boulder. On the back of her neck she could feel Laura’s amused smile but for once there was no self-consciouness. This was her place again and she opened her arms to the wide day. The sun flashed white on her bare arms and above her the buzzard let out a cry.

“We’re back, bitches!” she shouted suddenly and laughed at Laura’s outraged hushing about there possibly being children around. Something came together in her mind.

She stepped backwards off the stone, knowing exactly where she would land and how close Laura would be. Arms found her waist and they were right.

Laura’s lips on the back of her neck, over the bone, slipped sideways to make her shiver. Carmilla let Laura find the tension in her shoulder and melt it. She turned in Laura’s arms and found her lips.

“Took us long enough,” Laura said when they paused for a moment.

“All good things, cupcake.”

“I’m glad we came.”

“Up here? Or the whole thing?”

“The both. The whole of them.” She made a wave that took in the beaming afternoon, the world in general, Carmilla’s flushed cheeks. “Glad of all!”

“You’re cute when you can’t form sentences, you know that?”

Laura squeaked in protest and Carmilla was compelled to prove her point.


	5. Agon

Carmilla’s dreams were fierce joy, packed tight with exertion as she ran barefoot over hills and leapt across streams. There was someone in front of her, disappearing over the crest of each hill as she ate up the miles. The vision could not hold her for long however, and she kept waking to find Laura changing position in her arms. The kissing of yesterday evening had faded more or less imperceptibly into dreams and it was slightly difficult to remember at which point they had crossed over. The thing with the biting was – she checked her neck and then Laura’s too – pretty definitely dream, and presumably so were the activities that had followed. What she wasn’t sure about was the bit just before, with the bare waist under her hands. She repressed the speculation, ignored the morning light, and cuddled closer. She sank back into the pursuit across the landscape, joined by something tawny and ferocious by her side.

A few seconds later, as it seemed, there was a knock at the door. She lay there resenting it’s intrusion until she registered that it had stopped and Laura was moving around.

“Wha-?”

“Morning, Carm!” Laura handed her a cup of coffee as soon as she was approximately vertical from the waist up. “And isn’t it a fantastic morning?” She stretched, satisfied, and confounded Carmilla with how one person could look so cheerfully radiant first thing.

The coffee was hot and smelled of the real stuff, not the packaged instant muck in the box by the hotel room kettle. “Coffee?”

“Room service! Did you know you can just call them and they bring things up?” Her eyes gleamed with the discovery. “And they don’t even judge you if you want brownies for breakfast. Or if they do they do it quietly. Speaking of which – brownie?”

She blinked at the tray of food laid out at the foot of the bed. “Hell no. Yoghurt?”

“I got you black cherry. Your favourite,” she added confidently.

“I love you.”

Laura coloured, then moved to smugness. “You may have mentioned this a few times last night.”

“Is it too much?” Panic seized her with the spoon halfway to her mouth. “I know we’ve only-”

“Known each other for a year and spent like six months in each others’ pockets and mutually pining?” She made a face. “Look, I’ve used the shower after you for two mornings running and never once complained about your ability to coat everything with gunk. So I guess that’s love too.” She appeared proud of her self-sacrifice.

“So what do you want to do today?” Carmilla rescued a glass of orange juice from where the bending of the bedclothes threatened to tip it over. “We’ve done the caves. I’ve done angsting while you did the museum. And we’ve done walking. What’s today?”

Laura looked circumspect. “You know they do room service all day long, right? So we could...”

“Oh we could, could we?” That certainly held attractions. However a glance at the bedside table recalled her to the questions she had forced aside yesterday for the sake of a day of peace walking the hills. “Afternoon and evening, cupcake. But I want to try and find Belmonde today.”

Laura nodded. “I did kind of figure. And Carm - I do appreciate that you put it aside yesterday for me, that was sweet of you.”

It had taken her a good while to discover that about Carmilla. Their first meeting had not been auspicious – surly, standoffish, a brick wall between her and the world and usually a book as well. Seemed to have a line of casual study buddies as well, which was not to Laura’s taste at all.

It had been a month after they met when Laura had stumbled out of the library extremely after an eighteen hour workday and found Carmilla curled in an improbable position up a tree with a book, a flask of cocoa and a splendid view of the stars. All the hardness had gone from her voice when Laura spoke to her and she had hoisted her into the branches to actually talk for the first time. She had been conscious then of a feeling like when hiking in the hills, when a forbidding bluff would suddenly part and a view would be revealed on the other side, something unexpected but somehow inevitable.

She looked like that now. Her ultra-thick eyeliner smudged from the pillow, dark hair tangled rather than waving, the faint remains of the graze on her chin from the caves. Laura had carried Carmilla’s image with her these last three months in America, but that had been a vague fantasy compounded of her best outfits and sharpest faces. Here it was all rubbing off and the woman underneath, more physical – more messy, more real – showed through.

Her hands twitched with the urge to touch and stroke and rub until even that skin was worn away and she could work her way deeper and deeper into the puzzle that was Carmilla Karnstein, angry punk-rock existentialist who blushed perfectly when she looked up from her yoghurt to find Laura watching her.

* * *

“Somehow I didn’t see Belmonde as a museum nerd.”

“Yeah, me neither. But this is where I met her and she said she came in a lot.” Laura stuck her head round the cabinet of very round pottery women but the only person present was a bedraggled man scribbling in a notebook.

She pecked Laura on the cheek. It had been a long shot but neither of them knew any better ideas. “So should we leave a note or something? _Carmilla Woz Ere_ carved into a door? What’s the journalist style? Do we need a smoky bar to meet our mysterious contact? I can get a dame with legs from here till Tuesday to saunter in.”

“Would be nice. I could wear a trenchcoat. You know how I said to you I wasn’t sure how coincidental our meeting was?” She shrugged. “Yeah. So I think we hang around for a bit and see if anyone on the street saw us come in. And if not, ask at reception on the way out. Someone will have some idea about her.”

They sat down on a green upholstered bench in the centre of the Stone Age gallery. Carmilla was about to comment that the faces were all looking at them, but in truth there were very few human faces. The paintings were mostly of animals. Even one large human-like figure traced from a cave in Trois Frères wore a stag’s antlers as if to offset his humanity. His eyes were wide and hypnotic and she wondered if there were a bit of owl in him as well.

The lack of ancient words was troubling her on some level. All the writing, all the explanation, was modern. The memories of forty thousand years before were entirely wordless, mute witnesses who  
could do nothing except stare with the knowledge of what they had seen.

Laura let her fingers follows the bones in Carmilla’s hand. The parade of prehistory bothered her less today. When she had come alone hoping for some hint as to Carmilla’s panic attack, every lion and bear had seemed silent conspirators nudging each other behind the glass. But now that her girlfriend was with her and not breaking down, they had lost their obscure threat. The little ivory lion-man was more like a doll for a child than the echo of a fever dream.

“Mattie said an odd thing about her.” Laura pointed at the woman of Çatalhöyük lounging on the lion throne. “She said they were still worshipping her in historic times.”

Carmilla’s internal filing cabinet threw up a card. “What, as Cybele?” She arose and came around to where the glass box peeked into view. “Yeah… yeah, I suppose they could be related. I mean Cybele’s got a load of other stuff going on but I can see the resemblance. She was a Mistress of Animals too, like Artemis. A lot of Greek deities inherit stuff from the Near East – or maybe it’s just an image people keep coming up with.”

“Mattie said something about that. She said if there’s a source there will always be manifestations. Does that make sense to you?”

Carmilla looked around for inspiration. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I suppose it does.” A cave painting of two aurochs bulls with curving horns came to her aid. “You remember the Minotaur?”

“Obviously. Large, large gentleman with a bull’s head. Lived in a maze. A boy called Theseus with a big sword killed him with the help of Ariadne and her red wool. There was a really bad Doctor Who episode as well, but I don’t think that’s what you wanted to talk about.” She grouched, no doubt running through her list of grievances against the showrunner.

Carmilla tapped her on the head. “I accept your judgement. You will have to show me better episodes. So, what happened after Theseus killed him and married Ariadne?”

“They lived happily ever after and had tedious babies?”

“Nope! He ran off and dumped her on an islands and then she married Dionysus.”

“I always thought Theseus was a dick,” Laura declared with righteous indignation.

“Oh, and in so many ways. Now: Dionysus was a bull. I mean, he often appeared as a bull. There’s a scene in a tragic play where he goes in mortal disguise but when somebody starts to see through it, they see him as a bull.”

“Like, a bull.” Laura made a face. “Like, horns and ring through his nose and stamping bull? Huh. Well, I guess there are weirder gods. That death lady with the board games for one. Go on.”

“Now the Minotaur’s father was-”

“Wait, I know this!” He face fell as the memory broke though. “Oh, ick, this is the disgusting one isn’t it? He was an actual bull.”

“‘fraid so, cupcake. Ariadne’s mother Pasiphaë went mad and got frisky with the biggest, whitest, hottest hunk of bullflesh you ever saw.”

Laura let out the verbal equivalent of a shudder. “So what are you saying, bull-loving ran in the family?”

“Gets weirder than that.” She turned back to the reproduction of the cave painting and followed the line of the bull’s horns. “Ariadne’s father Minos was the son of Europa and Zeus.”

“And let me guess, Zeus transformed into a bull to quote-unquote seduce her? In the bro-ness of his heart.”

“Got it in one. Three generations of women and bulls. And all of it on Crete, an island with dozens of Bronze Age frescos of women leaping over bulls. Go figure. Myths are only half the story. Every story the Greeks told was tied to rituals, processions, dances, plays at the theatre, songs. And sometimes it’s like a kaleidoscope, or the bits you remember after a fever dream – the patterns keep repeating but you don’t know what the logic behind them is. I’m trying to write about why they still hold people’s attention even when all the things they were tied to are gone. It’s like people still recognise them at some level.”

“So what about your other stories? That one you told me when we were walking all about Kallisto turning into a bear?”

“I don’t know. There’s something, but I don’t think anyone really knows. People have ideas of course. No agreement. Whatever links them might be a lot, lot older than any of the versions we know. I mean I told you the Actaeon story the other day, right? The famous one, from Ovid: Actaeon surprises Artemis in her bath and gets torn to pieces by his own dogs. Right, but remember I was reading Gilgamesh when we first met?”

“It is pretty cool that you can read Sumerian.”

“Eh, 2015 was a dull year. Anyway, Gilgamesh gets approached by the goddess Inanna who wants to get all… heterosexual with him and he’s having none of it. So he reminds her of all the ways he’s mistreated her lovers. Including a shepherd boy who she turned into a wolf and who was torn to pieces by his own sheepdogs. Same story, thousands of years before.” She let that sink in, shrugged and looked at her watch. “Well, nobody here. Shall we head off? We can ask at the desk.”

The desk was occupied by a teenager who went extremely red at being addressed directly. He didn’t know Mattie’s name, but Laura tried a description.

“Matska Belmonde – dark skin, fashion sense, seriously sharp eyeliner?” A light went on in the boy’s eyes. “If you see her, tell her Carmilla wants to speak to her.”

* * *

“Laura? Can I ask you something?”

Her actual name and genuinely asking permission. She braced herself. “Sure.”

“Do you remember when your mother died?”

“Yes. I was very young, but I couldn’t forget that.” Carmilla waited, not willing to ask the question. Laura tried to collect her thoughts. “Six. I was six when Dad crashed the car. No,” she corrected herself, “I was six when the car crashed. I didn’t even see the boy in front change lanes without looking. And then there was a lot of smoke and nothing to do but keep my eyes open.”

Carmilla squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.” She paused until a decent interval had been achieved. “But I meant after. What it was like in the days after.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. Because you weren’t- yes, I see. Well, there were lots of people who came by. Relatives of course, friends of my parents. I got quite bored. It sounds horrible to say but it’s true. I wished everyone would go away so I could cry properly. Well, everyone but Dad. But it took him a while before he could cry properly.”

They had slowed to a crawl through the streets. Carmilla gently steered them towards the park. Talking was easier when walking.

“And you?”

Her boot kicked at a stone in their way. “It’s why I asked. I was ten, and I hardly remember a thing from that day. Even before is… oddly specific. I remember Maman, but I can’t summon up anyone else’s face. I remember home, but not going out anywhere. It’s like I had to do things a hundred times just to make one memory.”

“And being here? Has it helped?”

“I think some of it’s coming back. Yesterday. The light up there, the way the hillside smelled. That set me off a bit, I found I knew it.” She let the subject drop for a while before coming back to Laura’s question. “I wasn’t there when she died. I think I told you that once? Yeah. She had gone to into Marseilles for something or other. Not unusual. I was home in bed. I think I was ill. I was only beginning to get scared when the police came to tell me. And that was it. I never even got to see her.”

“You said it was...” Laura trailed off.

“Yeah. They never found who.” She ran a hand through her hair and found her scalp sweaty. “I was allowed to see the police files when I was eighteen – they’re in Marseilles, I don’t think I could have done it if I’d had to come up here. They seemed very confused about it. Whoever shot her had emptied their gun. Just again and again. And then she’d made a phone call. Not the police, not me, but with twelve bullets in her she’d called somebody and talked for a whole minute before hanging up herself and dying. The _fuck_.”

“Carm.” There were tears in the corners of Laura’s eyes when she stopped their progress and wrapped her arms around her.

“Hey, hey. It’s okay.” Carmilla stroked her hair. “It’s meant to be me crying, right?”

“You’re not even-”

“Did it years ago, creampuff.” She tucked her fingers below Laura’s chin and held their breath a penny’s width apart. “I didn’t come here to wallow in the past. I came to start new. That’s why I brought you.”

“But you’re starting to remember. Isn’t that the past?”

“That’s the future. It’s like when you have to clear out the old house before you can move into your new one. I wouldn’t be dragging all this up if you weren’t here to be, to be Laura.” She gulped and Laura saw how nervous she was, felt her heart hammering through her clothes and skin and bone and blood. “I want it to be you that I tell these things to. There hasn’t been anyone else, not for this, not for the important things.”

Laura bent her head and their foreheads touched. Around them people walking in the park impassively strolled around the girls wrapped in each other’s arms.

“Good. I mean, I want that too. I want you, even the tragic parts. Even the grumpy and moody parts. Even the parts when there’s nothing that can make it better.”

“Even the inconvenient panic attacks?”

“Even them.” A grin broke through. “Especially if it means I get to fuss over you.”

Carmilla’s lips on her cheek and down her chin to her neck. “I like the sound of fussing. Do go on.”

She gave a theatrical sigh and tried to suppress the shiver. “I’m sure you do. You’re like a cat.”

“Elegant and stylish?”

“I meant more like lazy. Greedy. Er-”

“Prissy.”

“Yes, that too. Ouch!” she squeaked as Carmilla pinched her for misapplying the adjective. “Oh, arrogant, vicious, sulky-”

Hands took hold of her waist. She let them walk her backwards, stepping carefully as Carmilla guided her back through the park and into the square. She was swivelled somewhere in the middle of the town and steered firmly towards their hotel.


	6. Crisis

“You don’t have any scars.”

“You sound disappointed.” Carmilla giggled at Laura’s intent expression as she continued her search. She was doing a very good straight face, which contrasted nicely with the kind of hair more normally associated with being dragged through a hedge backwards.

“Roll over. None there either! Hmm.” Her fingers walked up Carmilla’s spine. “It’s the kind of thing all mysterious brooding girls have, isn’t it? Some hidden scar with a tremendous story behind it. From when you ran the evil villain through with a sword or escaped your wicked boarding school.” She bent to kiss Carmilla’s unmarked shoulder blade. There was a little dimple where a mattress button had left its mark further down, but that didn’t count.

Carmilla righted herself and offered her lips instead.

“Actually you don’t have any marks,” Laura mused once matters had calmed down a bit. “Not even scratches.”

Carmilla took Laura’s hand and exhibited her own blunt and bitten fingernails to her. “Oh come on, you won’t do much damage with those.”

She blushed furiously. “I didn’t mean that! I meant the graze on your chin from the caves is completely gone. Very smooth jawline.” She kissed it in demonstration. “And you didn’t get any mosquito bites when we went walking, not at all. _And_ you didn’t sunburn.”

“I’ve got a little mole here,” Carmilla protested and exhibited a shoulder for Laura’s consideration. “The rest is just good genes. Whereas _you_ , cupcake, have freckles that need to be counted.” She began with Laura’s cheek and the count had reached twenty-seven by the time the resulting giggles were no longer restrainable.

Goosebumps sprung up in the wake of Carmilla's lips. Laura shivered.

"Oh, you go goosebumpy!" she crowed. "It would be a huge shame if some wicked girl were to take advantage of that."

"Do you treat every girl who ends up in your bed like this?" Laura complained. It seemed wise to prepare for anything.

Carmilla weighed up the options. "Like this in the sense of finding something to torment them about? Oh, cupcake, you have _no_ idea. But," she added in a hurry, "you are not simply a _girl who ends up in my bed_ as you so delightfully put it - so I think I shall be finding extra good ways to treat you."

"You'd better." She inspected her residing bumps and then watched them reappear as Carmilla found the right spot on her neck. "They're vestigial, you know. When cats stick their hair up to look bigger, it's the same reflex."

"Is that so? I do like cat facts."

“I learned that from Sarah-Jane. She was a freaking medical prodigy. All sorts of useful facts.” She glanced at the angle of the sun in through the window suggesting the day was quite late already. “I wonder how the day is looking."

She struggled out of bed, fending off an affectionate but distracting squeeze from Carmilla, and wrapped the discarded bedsheet around her to preserve at least the impression of modesty when opening the windows. A bit of tucking and it served as a rudimentary white gown. Carmilla lay back in the sunlight to admire her, in the process becoming infinitely more admirable herself. Laura dragged her eyes away and forced herself to watch a woman with a flower cart in the square. She felt eyes on the bare patch of back.

"Well don't you look like a virgin sacrifice?" Carmilla drawled.

Laura fixed her with a severe look. "You know perfectly well that I don't, Miss Karnstein. You know _extremely_ well. Though you needn't give yourself the impression that you deserve credit for it, before you start being too proud of yourself." She enjoyed the small flicker of unwarranted but inescapable jealousy across Carmilla's face and turned back to the window. "I might look like I'm about to flee my brooding lover across the moors, though. Do you think?"

"Accurate." Carmilla let a cruel smile drift across her face. "The brooding lover thing not the fleeing thing. I hope. But you know, I rather like the idea of you as a non-virgin sacrifice. Trussed up somewhere."

Laura went pink, and then red, and then had to slowly retrogress to pink before she could reply. It came out more as an "Urk" than anything else. Carmilla somehow managed to smirk on both sides of her face.

“Oh!” Laura leaned out of the window suddenly, peering at something in the square. “Carm, I think you have an appointment in the cafe.”

Carmilla dragged the remaining bedclothes about her and joined Laura at the window, sliding a hand in between folds of cloth to press the bare base of her spine. She followed her pointing. In the outdoor seating of the cafe was unmistakeably Matska Belmonde. She wasn’t looking in their direction and indeed she didn’t seem to be looking anywhere. But there was a small pile of magazines beside her and she clearly intended to sit there for some time, waiting for the girls to get round to noticing her.

* * *

Carmilla went down alone. She glanced back at the hotel room window and saw Laura still standing there, watching over her. It gave her heart.

Mattie caught her eye halfway across the square and held it until she had sat wordlessly at the table. There was a glass of something cloudy before her which she drained and handed to the waiter as he passed by. He brought two more without needing to ask, and set one in front of Carmilla. She swallowed the floral, slightly bitter drink in one gulp and avoided Mattie’s eyes.

At last she pulled the photograph out of her pocket and laid it on the table. Her arms folded, she waited for an explanation. The child Carmilla’s face smiled a puzzled smile out of the paper, her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Mattie posed perfectly, not looking a day younger than she did in the cafe. And the strange old woman lurking in the back.

“A lovely summer,” was Mattie’s only comment. “You were eight. I remember the champagne was very good that year.”

“Why are _you_ there?”

“I was there often, Kitty. I hoped this would jog your memory.” She fingered the paper with red manicured nails and got a small shake of Carmilla’s head in reply. An eyebrow raised, some understanding reached. Apparently she hadn’t expected the blank from Carmilla.

“Should I, then? Why should I know you?” She glanced around the cafe as if expecting everone to be suddenly familiar and recognised.

Mattie pouted, a glint of lipstick. “Well _I_ like to think I’m memorable, darling. Was I not quite _en pointe_ that day, do you think? Such a pity. I do admit light blue might not be entirely my colour.”

Carmilla’s finger circled the face of the third woman, the old one. “And who’s that?”

A twinkle in Mattie’s eyes. “Oh, I’ll let her explain herself. She doesn’t live round here, but I hope you’ll meet her before long.” Suddenly she tossed back the last of her drink, leaned forward over the table and laid a hand on Carmilla’s. “What took you so long, Kitty? We missed you.”

She jerked back in her seat, but her reflexive tug of her hand got her nowhere. Mattie’s grasp was firm, deceptively strong. “Took me-”

“To come back. Oh, I know it must have been hard,” she said, her bottom lip making a pitiful expression, “but we were all so impatient. Me especially, si- dear. But,” she released Carmilla, sat back and clapped her hands as her face lightened, “you’re here now. Mildly more amnesiac than I expected, and that is disappointing. But on the plus side, you’ve certainly blossomed. Spunky and punky, very up to the moment, I think. And with a charming young ladyfriend. I bet you just tear girls’ hearts out with a face like that, am I right?”

She made a square of her fingers and mimed taking a fashion-plate photograph. Her smile warm and a face of honest amusement, she seemed to be expecting Carmilla to join in the joke.

“Hmm, not laughing yet,” she tutted. Carmilla remained impassive, waiting for answers rather than patronising. “You don’t remember at all how you left this place, do you? Not at all. Oh, Milla.”

The conversation appeared to be returning to the important matters and she tried to shake off the urge to raise her hackles and hiss. “No. I mean, I don’t remember well. There’s some things, but it’s a bit of a mess.” She paused. “A lot of my childhood actually. It’s vague. I thought that was normal – I mean, it is normal, but Laura says it’s weird to not know this much. The day Maman died was no different.”

“Why not? Isn’t that the kind of thing that would normally stick in the mind?”

Carmilla stared at her. That was the hitherto unnoticed mystery that had been slowly sinking in as she gradually opened up to Laura and found her past all at once with unexamined holes in. “Well, yeah. That’s my point. I mean I was… I think I was ill.”

But Mattie pressed “What with?”

“I don’t know! Children are always getting ill, right?” She shrugged and darted her eyes back to the hotel window to see if Laura was still watching. It was empty. “Chicken pox or measles or meningitis or – what does it matter? I had a fever.”

Mattie dropped that line of attack. “So what _do_ you remember? Start with the first thing.”

“I was – well, I was ill. And it was dark and Maman hadn’t come home. I was scared. And then the police came to collect me.” One of the fragments that stood out in her memory was the sound of the wheels crunching the gravel on the drive. Not her mother’s car, she could tell just from the sound of the engine.

“The police?” Mattie’s face assumed the careful absence of expression of a poker player.

“Yeah. They said something bad had happened, that they’d found her. And they took me to the station and put me in one of the cells for the night.”

“Who did?”

She frowned. “The police. Like I said. There were two them, both women. I suppose that seemed kinder.”

“And what did you do all night? Did you fall asleep right away?”

“Hey, I came down here so that _I_ could ask the questions.” Mattie just looked back as impassive as a cat. “Um… no. No, I didn’t. One of them stayed with me. She made me a cup of tea and she told me I had to be brave because things were going to change a lot for me. And then I cried and asked when I could see Maman but she said there had been an accident and Maman was dead. And she gave me a hug.”

Strange to say, it was the hug that was the clear solid core of the memory, the only bit that felt properly real. The concrete walls and orangey half-light of the cell were faded so deep into the background that they might as well be a stage set, but the woman’s arms around her were safe. They smelt of smoke and the resiny herbs of the hillside, and of warmth.

Mattie took a while to ask another question. She played with the cover of one of the books next to her, turning the corner into a dog-ear and then back again. “And you trusted her? Forgive me Kitty, but you don’t seem like the kind of girl who’d just believe a strange woman who takes her from her house and tells her she’ll never see her mother again.”

Carmilla stared at her empty glass. Under her feet the ice was cracking. If she looked down she would see the gaping hole underneath. She waited for the next step to be made clear to her.

“What then?” Mattie prompted.

“I drank the tea and – well, I felt sleepy but I didn’t want to sleep. So she lit a lantern and… and she made shadow puppets on the wall until I forgot all about staying awake.” Carmilla willed Mattie not to laugh.

“Shadow puppets?” Mattie raised an eyebrow, but there was no laughing. That gave Carmilla heart.

“Yeah. Like... it’s hard to remember, but first she did hands. She made them big and small. Going round in circles. And then animals. Dogs and cats and deer and bulls, all over the walls of the cell.” Carmilla closed her eyes. The figures were tenuous in her memory but it didn’t feel like the fading of age. It felt like the memory had gone in with fuzzy edges in the first place. The golden glow of the lantern was a halo around a pair of hands, folding and unfolding into new shapes, and the bitter taste of some tea that wasn’t what she was used to drinking.

See? The voice said in her vision. She could not place it, it spoke in the ambiguous tones that signified the meaning having been recalled rather than the sound. _See how they dance, Milla? Here’s one like my hand and here’s one like yours_.

“She sang me a song - a lullaby - and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was in a police car with all different officers, halfway to Geneva to meet my father.” The tale ended abruptly, just as that awful evening had. The sleep turning into confused awakening, but the memories after Actée were entirely sharp. The new policewoman with the kind face and bleached-blonde hair who sat with her in the car, the driver who swore quietly at the rain and got hushed. The contrast with what went before turned one or the other into a dream.

Mattie paused and then suddenly leaned sharply across the table for the second time. She placed a strong hand on Carmilla’s and spoke urgently. “Didn’t they have anywhere to put you except the cell? Couldn’t they have hired a hotel room? Got a hostel down in Aix-en-Provence or Marseilles? Why change liaison officers halfway through? This was what, 2003? It wasn’t exactly before decent childcare. You’re a smart woman, Milla: now don’t you think there’s something wrong with that story?”

The shock of the words went in. Carmilla turned her story over in her mind, feeling for the cracks. She saw the car coming up the drive to collect her, plain silver and unmarked. She could not see the faces of those who collected her, but one wore jeans and the other jodhpurs. She saw the rough concrete of the cell wall, bare and damp and lit only by a flickering lantern. And since when were French police stations like that? She tried again to summon up faces but everything solid melted away.

Mattie’s eyes were bright, intense. They urged. “Mattie, why are you asking me this?”

Her face bore a strange expression. On top was the tension, the pushing of the questions. In the eyes an unplaceable sadness. But somewhere below, somewhere trying to find its way out by the twitching corners of her mouth was a buried laugh. Carmilla watched her weigh the options.

“Because I think I made the tea a bit too strong.” It was fondness in her voice, not mockery. “Darling Carmilla, you may be having some difficulty right now but I could never forget that evening.”

The ice cracked beneath her. “Oh my God.”

Mattie tugged her clenched hand up and kissed the top of Carmilla’s fingers. She did not interrupt the war of unbelief inside Carmilla’s head, but matched her eyes and sung, hushed soft and wordless. A lullaby. The notes sunk into the depths of Carmilla’s unconscious and there was Mattie’s face glowing in the orange light of somewhere dark and confined. Shapes of shadow moved around her like a child’s mobile, like a painted freize of animals around a nursery wall.

She cuffed the pricking tears away, and then had to do it again. The question didn’t come all the same. She gulped. Sounds came out.

“It wasn’t the police,” Mattie confirmed. “And we didn’t take you to the station.”

She knew at once. “The caves.” The walls of hands and the lions watching her as she fell asleep. Someone had brushed the hair from her face as she drifted off.

Mattie reached out and tucked a loose lock behind her ear. “Yes. For the night. We couldn’t let you be found by anyone else until we’d got things under control. And I couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye.”

“Mattie, who _are_ you?”

She ignored the question. “There wasn’t any time. Lilita – well, you know what happened. Everyone who knew your mother would have been under suspicion, and you would have been in a real police station answering questions for weeks about everything you’d seen and heard.”

“I did! I did do that, after I arrived at Father’s place. Interpol-”

“Yes, but by then you didn’t remember. Like I said, I think I made the tea a bit too strong. Didn’t mean for you to lose that much of your mother.” She grinned at Carmilla putting two and two together.

“You- you made me forget.” Mattie inclined her head. “What didn’t you want to police to hear?” A dart of fear took her and she burst out with the drop in her stomach, “what were you hiding? Mattie, what did you do?”

She was almost on her feet and Mattie rose enough to push her gently back into her chair again. Somewhere around the bar the waiter stopped in his hurry to bring them the bill before they left without it.

Carmilla took a breath. “I asked you before who you are. You haven’t answered me.”

Mattie kept hold of her hand as a promise. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had. More than that, she was like a second mother to me. Carmilla, there are bigger questions than the ones you’re asking, and I can’t answer the little ones until I’ve answered the big ones. They are the kind of answers that have to be shown, not told. Will you come with me tomorrow night? Just you.”

“Where to?”

“You know where. There’s something you need to remember.”


	7. Metamorphosis

“I don’t think you should go alone.”

“Cupcake, if I thought Mattie would let me take you along I would. But she won’t.” 

“Well what if she, I don’t know, steals your soul and puts it into a jar or something?” Laura was sitting on the bed, arms folded and looking very stubborn.

Carmilla laughed. “ _That’s_ the first thing that pops into your head? Cupcake, she knew my mother. She knew _me_. How else am I going to make sense of this all?”

Laura made a face. “I know. If she won’t – look, I don’t want to sound like my dad, but keep your phone on, okay? And don’t drink anything she gives you if you don’t know what it is. And don’t sign anything either!”

“Got it, creampuff. I see your face. I know that face.” Carmilla refrained from mentioning that signal would not work if Mattie really did take her to the caves. “Okay. It’s going to be fine. I’ll be back as soon as I can and I’ll tell you all about it.”

She stamped her boots together to check they didn’t slip and held Laura for a moment. “I love you, all right?” She flicked Laura’s nose.

When she had gone Laura sat there on their bed – originally her bed, but the one Carmilla had chosen for the first night had not been slept in for some nights – and worried. She had run through the obvious possibilities of kidnapping, highly elaborate con games and Cold War deep cover agents and was just starting on more creative ideas about smuggler dynasties and the island of Monte Cristo when there was a knocking on the door. Momentarily her heart leapt and she was on her feet before remembering that Carmilla would have had a key and didn’t need to knock. Instead, outside of the door was a tall and muscular woman in a sleeveless top.

It took a couple of seconds. “Mel?”

“Hollis. Can I come in?” Laura got out of the way and Mel came in, traipsing mud from her heavy boots over the carpet. She looked around.

“How did you-”

“Only two hotels in town. It wasn’t hard. Karnstein’s already gone off with Belmonde, then.”

Her stomach turned over. “Yes, how did you-”

Mel took her by the shoulder. Her face was deadly serious. “I think you should come with me. I think you need to see what Carmilla sees tonight.”

Laura stared at her. She opened her mouth to ask if there was danger, but Mel hushed her immediately.

“It’s okay. She’s not… it’s not that kind of danger. But you should see. Belmonde didn’t want you to know but I saw you two holding hands and if you care for Carmilla at all you shouldn’t be kept in the dark. She’ll need you afterwards,” she added.

Laura was already putting on her shoes. “What is it you know?”

“I’m… Belmonde is the head of a group of people. A society, a religious thing. I’m a member, but that doesn’t mean we always see eye to eye. She likes to keep things under wraps. That gets my goat, you know?”

“Religious..?” She pulled aside the closed curtain and tried to see if lights were on in the church.

“Not that kind of religious, kiddo. Come on. We have to go now.”

* * *

Carmilla found Mattie in the square. It was early evening, the sky fading from orange in the west to a gathering grey in the east. Windows were lit up across the town but there were plenty of people in the bars and the park enjoying the balmy air.

“Darling.” Mattie was leaning backwards against a lamp-post and as Carmilla approached she shook herself upright to kiss the girl’s cheeks. The welcome took her aback a little. “You look ready.”

“What are you going to show me?” Mattie didn’t quite look like she was about to go walking in the hills. Granted, she had abandoned heels and silk, but sandals and a linen shift still weren’t exactly hiking gear.

She winked. “Let’s see, shall we? Come.” Her hand found the small of Carmilla’s back and steered her through the few streets between the square and the track leading up into the open hills. They took the path that she had come with Laura that first time to see the caves, the slow scramble up the gravel between fragrant shrubs and now-closed flowers. In the evening the air was different. The breezes felt less like welcome relief and more like messengers, come from the sea or the piling hills to greet them. The holm-oaks were sharper in outline, more ragged now that they were outlined in black.

The country from the top of the hill showed the contrast of the landscape. The town behind her with lights standing out individually was a little outpost of the blurred orange glow of Marseilles in the distance. But the hills were black on the navy blue of the sky and the Cat’s Tooth in the north a jagged silhouette. The one was in invader into the territory of the other – unstable, tenuous, transient. It came to Carmilla that even the slow world of rural Provence that seemed a backwater compared with Paris or London was itself a wholly modern thing. Five hundred years ago, a thousand, two thousand and the whole thing wouldn’t have been there. Compared with the dripping of water in the caves that had gone on for forty thousand years it was as superficial as the thin skin stretched over her flesh.

The cave centre was dark and the doors locked. The carpark was deserted except for one battered car with a staff sticker in the windscreen. Mattie, however, did not lead Carmilla to the front door with its board listing ticket prices but around the side. Behind the wings of the building was the fenced-off approach to the caves. Notices forbad trespassing. The barbed wire topped fence was forbidding but one panel proved to be a gate in disguise and the padlock was only pretending to be locked. Mattie kicked off her sandals.

The hinges sang in the quiet of the night and Carmilla followed Mattie’s bare footsteps up the path to the yawning entrance.

The smell was the same as she remembered it. There was no difference between day and night in this place. Slow dripping of water was the only thing to mark time, and the incremental seasons of dissolution and precipitation. Carmilla’s booted feet sounding incredibly loud in her ears as they stamped on the walkway. They were intrusive and even rude next to Mattie walking silent as a cat. The soft guide lights were turned off in the cavern but there was another source of light - at the first turning of the passage, a flame was burning. It was placed on the ground, pushed to one side. A little covered pottery bowl with a flame coming out of a hole in the lid – an oil lamp, something out of the distant past. Mattie picked it up by its handle and handed it to Carmilla. Something about her confident stride as she led the way suggested it was more for Carmilla’s benefit than hers.

The first gallery was the home of the great galloping stag. Carmilla raised the lamp so that in the orange flickering the lines of its hoofs and antlers wavered. Around it the tiny figures hunting seemed mere cracks in the stone. Without the comforting hum of shuffling tourists it was starker than before. Mattie made a small bow and Carmilla, uncertain as to whether there was some obligation on her, spared it a curt nod just in case.

The second gallery was the cave of the lions. With less light they loomed unexpectedly as the oil lamp floated through the chamber. Ranks and ranks of faces massed like photos in a family album, or like the endless names on a war memorial. The countless roster of lions long dead. Carmilla wondered how long it had taken to cover the walls like this. Looking at it casually you could say ‘Stone Age’ or – what was it? – ‘Aurignacian’. But how long had that gone on for? Was it one wonderful summer that a tribe had come here and fallen into a powerful obsession, compulsively painting lions until they tired? Or was this the graveyard of an unfolding tradition, one lion a year, one lion a century even, until the endless years mounted up?

Mattie stopped and indicated a place on the floor in front of the largest painting.

“This is where you fell asleep,” she said. “You liked the big one, you said she was the lioness who looked after you in your dreams.”

A chill passed across her shoulders. Carmilla let it pass.

After the cave of lions was the passage leading to the place of hands. She paused outside and tried to gather herself.

“You’ll be all right, Kitty,” Mattie said. “You’ve unearthed that bit. You’ve just got to keep going to the next bit.”

Her heart was tight as the entered the cave of hands. All around her, the walls and ceilings were covered in the shadows of hands. In the haze of the oil lamp Carmilla still held, most were invisible as anything other than half-shapes, unseen unless you knew they were there. She remembered what the Australian girl had said to Laura on her tour, that you could tell where the artist had stood by looking at their handprint. All through the chamber were the ghosts of bodies with outstretched hands. Overlapping, combining, blurring into a single will that pounded its mark into the stone year after year.

“How did they do it?” she wondered aloud. “How did they keep coming back year after year?”

Mattie had almost folded into the dark of a corner. She extended her own hand into the lamplight so that it seemed to come out of the walls itself. “Time is not the question. Eternity is. Shadows on the wall of the cave, Carmilla. They are not the echoes of something out there. They are the prototypes. This is the Dreaming where things are made as they have always been made in the image of eternity. Come further in.” She stepped back and dissolved into dark entirely.

When Carmilla had come down with Laura they had noticed the fenced off passages leading deep into the hill. But not all were fenced off this night. One stood open and waiting. Mattie paused at the gateway to the deep caves and ran a finger over Carmilla’s shoulder before leading the way down.

The way down was not steep, but they were off the metal walkway and sand chamber floors put down for tourists. Underfoot was damp, a mixture of wet stone and eroding gritty mud. In hollows small puddles collected and the water splashing on her legs was icy. Mattie’s choice to go barefoot seemed a practical decision after all since she seemed able to find footholds by feel, but Carmilla’s heavy boots proved their worth too. As the passage continued to sink and her eyes widened, Carmilla became conscious that there was approaching light.

The mouth of the passage opened up and she gasped.

The chamber was huge, easily the size of a football pitch, and with a ceiling that sloped from just above head height at this side to be lost in the echoing shadows above on the other. The far edge of the floor was raised a couple of feet above the rest of the ground and on it a fire was burning, outlining the walls in shifting yellow. The smoke rose smoothly in a spiralling column and Carmilla guessed that somewhere in the roof above there was a passage with a draft sucking it all along to God knows where.

Here and there in brackets on the walls or held in iron stands were flaming torches, smelling of pitch and resiny wood. Next to the fire was a heavy cauldron, reflecting orange from its beaten sides in the firelight, and standing behind it dressed in a sort of loose tunic was a familiar woman with her hair bound back.

“Semirah, darling.” Mattie glided forward to the tour guide, her manner ceasing to be fey and flowing back to the society hostess. “Are we ready? Where is-”

“Behind you.” Another woman similarly dressed detached herself from the shadows and kissed Mattie’s offered cheek. Her black hair was carefully braided.

“Milla, meet Marcela. A most charming young lady,” Mattie chucked her under the chin. “Marcela, this is of course Carmilla. Semirah, I think you two know each other already.” She spoke as if they were meeting in a bar.

“You’re in on this?” Carmilla asked, for want of any better phrasing. Semirah smiled. In the shadows of the cave and with the bright flame moving from eye to eye she looked a lot less friendly than when in her museum uniform.

“It’s very easy to get into caves when you’re the one supposed to be guarding access,” she said.

Carmilla looked around as if expecting other faces to be watching her. “Any more? That Mel girl, is she-”

“She’ll be joining us.” Mattie had in her hand a small wooden bowl and dipped it into the cauldron. It came out full of dark liquid and as Carmilla drew closer she smelled something sweet and heady, cut with herbs. Mattie saw her nervousness. “Mostly wine,” she explained. “Some honey, herbs. Flowers.” It seemed up to scratch and she emptied the bowl after a brief taste.

“You said you were going to explain about my mother,” she reminded Mattie. “And about me. I thought you were going to show me something. Like, heirlooms or a memorial or – I don’t know. Instead I get hubble bubble toil and trouble?”

Mattie ignored the question and asked one of her own. “Do you know the story of Pentheus, Milla?”

“Sure. I mean, of course.” Carmilla was reluctant to get sidetracked from the main issue but Mattie gestured at her to tell. “Okay, so. Pentheus is king of Thebes. He’s quite young, he’s a bit over-confident. And there’s a story he doesn’t believe. See, his aunt Semele was one of the frankly alarming number of young women who had a thing with Zeus. And she gave birth to a child and was burned up in the birth of it. That child was the god Dionysus.

“Pentheus refused to believe that. He said she’d committed adultery and tried to cover it up. And for some years he ruled Thebes. But then Dionysus came back and brought his entourage with him. All the wild mad women, the Bacchae, and many of the women of Thebes went out into the hills to join them. Some of the men went to pay homage to the god too, but Pentheus refused. So Dionysus came to him in disguise and told him that there was a way he could spy on the goings-on. He dressed himself up in the costume of a Bacchant and pushed aside a branch to see them. They recognised him and once and fell on him. Pentheus was torn to pieces under their hands and his own mother carried his head home, thinking it to be the head of a lion.”

Mattie clapped softly. “Perfect. And who does that remind you of?”

“I mean… Actaeon is the obvious comparison.”

“Actaeon. Yes. Yes, I suppose so.” Mattie let a long, slow smile grow on her face. “I had someone else in mind actually, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.”

* * *

“So what kind of religion?” Laura asked. She had to ask it word by word between breaths. Mel was setting a ferocious march over the hill, up the gravel path and past the posts with red markers showing the way to the caves. “The raising money for charity kind? The shouting at gay people kind? The meditating and riddles kind?”

Mel didn’t look back. “Karnstein ever tell you the story of Zagreus?”

“Um, no. Not to my knowledge.”

“Zagreus was the name of the first Dionysus.” Her voice was neutral. Laura tried to detect any signs of worrying urgency, but she spoke quite normally.

“There was more than one?”

“There were several. Zagreus was the first, the primordial one born to Zeus of the Heavens and Persephone of the Underworld. Zagreus was given rule over the world by his father. He gave him into the hands of the Titans to care for him, but instead they tore him into pieces, cooked him in a cauldron and ate him. So Zeus blasted them with lightning until they were ash and vapour and then baked the ash into human beings. The blood of Zagreus forms the soul of human beings.”

“Right.” The path crested the hill and they looked down on the cave entrance below. There were cars in the carpark and a faint movement of shadows suggesting that one or two people were walking quietly towards the fenced off area at the back. From somewhere there was a black fluttering and a small flock of bats passed overheard. Laura started thinking about all the entrances and exits there might be to the labyrinth below.

“What do you think?” Mel prompted.

“Er – about?”

“That. That idea. Of our origin being a sacrifice and a transformation.”

It sounded like somewhere between creepy cult stuff and metaphorical but still creepy normal religious stuff, but she didn’t say it. Words came back to Laura from out of the depths of dream. “Life will have its sacrifices.” It seemed like it might be an appropriate sentiment if Mel was a member of this group.

“Ah.” Mel’s face when she looked back bore an intensity that was frightening. “You do know, then. Deep down.”

Laura ground her teeth, but the important thing was not complaining about mysterious twaddle but finding Carmilla and making sure she was safe. “We’re going down there?”

“Yes.” She checked her watch. “In about thirty minutes the doors will be closing. I’ll go in last, give some excuse about being held up and say that I’ll shut up the entrance while I’m there. But I’ll let you in before I do that, and then you can follow me downwards as far behind as you can without losing sight. That way there won’t be anyone behind you to spot you. All right?”

That sounded to Laura like she would be between everyone there and the exit, which was very much the right way round for a dangerous investigation. “And what will I see?”

“A transformation.”

* * *

“Mattie, what’s going on here? I came tonight to find out about my mother. About what you sent me away from. I’m – look, I’m just not interested in whatever you’ve got going on with Miss Cauldron and Fire over there.” Mattie had finished giving muttered directions to Semirah and Marcela and now guided Carmilla to an alcove in the far back of the great cavern.

“Patience, Kitty. We’re nearly there. I said there are things you need to remember, but they’re not things I can tell you. What you need is a reminder so that you can remember yourself.” She stopped and opened her hands to the floor below her. There was a rectangular trench, about the size of a single bed. “You were never baptised. It’s time we remedied that.”

There seemed little she could appropriately say, so she took the other option. “What the fuck are you on about?”

She indicated the trench. Carmilla bent over it cautiously and realised two things. Firstly it was wider in the middle than at the ends and this gave it something of the unsettling silhouette of a coffin. Secondly, it was not a trench now that Mattie held the lamp over it. That is, it was not a foot or two deep but at least twenty or thirty. A pit. She could not see the bottom save for the slightest of hints that there was water.

“Okay, I’m done.” She stood up straight and folded her arms. “I’m leaving. No more games, no more _ooh, let’s be mysterious_ , no more doing the set-up for a cut-price French version of _The Wicker Man_. I’m done.”

“Carmilla. _Cheri_. You’re a smart woman and you know when you’re in over your depth.” Mattie’s eyes gleamed. “You know how your mother died and you know why that doesn’t make sense. You know you once trusted me enough to leave your home when I came to collect you even if you can’t remember why. You know I gave you a drink that clouded your memory for over a decade. Did you really expect a photo album of charming holiday snaps and a diary?”

This probably fell under the heading of things Laura had told her not to do. Carmilla stared into the black pit. Experimentally she found a piece of gravel and listened to the splash as it hit the water. Definitely thirty feet. And Laura was back at the hotel. “Down there?” she asked.

“Down there. There’s a way out. From the bottom there is a passage which leads up here to this level again. A bit of a strain, but if you can’t make it out you’re not Lilita Morgan’s daughter.”

She filed that under ‘possible double meaning’. “And what will I find?”

Mattie beamed and jabbed her gently in the back. “What you always find at the end of a fairy tale, Carmilla. That you had the answer within you all along.”

“I will… live, won’t I?”

“Oh yes, you’ll live. Ready?”

She had after all done stupider things. And look at it this way: if she didn’t go down, she would spend the rest of her life wondering what was at the bottom.

Carmilla took a deep breath with her toes over the edge, and then quickly a second one as Mattie looked about ready to push her in. She sat down at the edge of the pit and dangled her legs over the blackness.

“Can I go down slowly?”

“If you like. But do go down.” She beckoned Semirah and Marcela to come forward. The three women laid their hands on her, supporting her back and shoulders, and helped lower her into the hole, facing across the narrow width. She braced her legsagainst the opposing wall and began to shuffle downwards, spanning the pit. The sides were wet and muddy and she had to strain outwards to keep herself steady.

She had made it halfway when she slipped. A part of the stone crumbled and came away in her hand. She half-slid, half-fell down slimy gritty muddy slopes until landing with a shocking cold splash in the water below that forced the breath out of her lungs. It was deeper, far deeper than she had thought and she fought to keep her head above the surface. She shouted out for help from Mattie above but no answer echoed down the chute. There was no light beyond the vague orange of the firelight in the narrow hole far above her head.

Panic gripped her, the same panic that had cut through her mind in the cave of hands. She felt her stomach clenching and a buzzing right in the middle of her skull. The instinct to curl into a ball and wait it out. The panic attack from the cave of hands was lurking under the surface and she struggled to keep it down. That would solve nothing.

“Mattie!”

No reply from above. This had probably been inevitable. She cursed herself. Heart beating faster and faster in the icy water. That kept her warm at least but it thundered in her head like the galloping of hoofbeats. She willed her eyes to see more than they could.

Mattie hadn’t lied. There really was an opening at one end, but it wasn’t at the bottom with her and the water. It was about ten or fifteen feet above, cut into the wall at the foot of the coffin. Not high enough to stand up in but enough to crawl. She braced herself across the two closest sides, feet and shoulders, and tried to walk herself up the opposing wall of the shaft and shift along. It took some wobbling but she made it up a few feet before the tenuous pose gave way and she fell back into the water, smacking her shoulder blade on a jutting piece of rock and shouting in pain.

The panic in her head and heart and lungs ran on. It was a fight or flight reaction, only there was nothing to fight and no way to flee. She couldn’t reach the way out. She wasn’t tall enough or strong enough or athletic enough. This was a challenge too great for the body she dwelt in. A scream of frustration built up in her lungs but it came out as a growl. There was a burning in her hands as if she had thrust them into hot water after being out in the cold. Rage at the limitations imposed on her will.

She could see hardly anything in this pit but she knew somehow everything was the wrong shape. Nothing fit. In the desperation of being submerged in a place where the human body was hopeless, the deep root parts of her brain fell back on an instinct she didn’t know she had. It started in her fingers. In the panic she tried to dig her blunt nails into the walls of the cave to get a purchase but they slipped and slipped until suddenly they didn’t. Until all at once her nails were not bitten and torn to stumps but rather strong and sharp and stabbing into cracks in the crumbling rock and holding on. She tried to withdraw them but instead of her fingers unclamping her reflexes retracted her claws into their beds. She cried out in shock but it emerged as a hiss.

Somewhere inside her she found the reflex.

Her body arched, bucked, thrashed, threw itself against the stone and stunned her. Her shoulders bent and broke apart and it was the worst pain she had ever felt. Her vision crowded out with sharp stabbing light. The stray ends of bones grated and scraped over tearing flesh as they split apart and the obscene sound of joints reforming ground in her ears. Her teeth – her fangs - tore through the confining gums in their hurry to grow and impaled her tongue before that too split open and was remade in a gush of blood she had to half spit out and half swallow. The rumbling in her ears became a thunderclap and her whole skull folded like origami. There was stabbing pain in her legs and instinctively she tore at what remained of her clothes to set herself free. Damp fur. She bent double and broke off stray bands of cloth with her teeth.

She was something else now and the passageway a few feet above the bottom of the pit no longer posed a problem. She found purchase on sheer walls, climbed, leapt. Her claws scrabbled her into the entrance. Mud coating every surface, she crept in a spiralling path upwards, finding that the smell of air moving down from above was an encouragement that her human self would be despairing without. Up and along the passage, stones under her paws and vibrations in the air on her whiskers. The ceiling only a few feet high but she could walk on all fours, crouching close to the ground as if she were stalking. The coiled strength in her legs.

The way up turned and bent, looped around the coffin shaft and came out some way up the rear wall of the great cavern. She felt her eyes adjust instantly to the firelight and no longer were there impenetrable shadows in the unlit corners of the room. She saw clearly with her new eyes, saw the others waiting for her and what they were. She stumbled on unsteady paws onto the uneven walls, slithered down the last few feet and landed before the impassive mouth of the giant lioness. The panther that was Carmilla Karnstein drew itself up in its caul of mud and slime. It watched the lion rear up and fold backwards until it shook off the shape and became a woman again.

Matska Belmonde’s eyes shone in the fire and she opened her arms in welcome.


	8. Sparagmos

She lay on the cold stone of the cavern floor breathing raggedly. There was a hand resting on her head, slowly running long fingers through her hair. The fuzz and dislocation in her brain would not let her get up, or reply, or even examine what Mattie was saying. In her mouth was the taste of mud and foul water. A blanket kept her from shivering. She watched the shadows move on the ceiling.

“Once upon a time,” Mattie was saying, “was a woman who fled into the hills. She came upon a hidden cave where she thought she would be safe from those who pursued her. But that night when she slept she saw the lion in her dream.

“And the lion said to her, _make you an offering of you own body and I shall repay in kind_. And she did as she was told. She pulled out her hair and placed it in the pit. Then she tore her skin away and placed it there too. Finally she laid down in the dark and broke open the bones of her limbs. And the lion ate her down to the last fragment of bone.

“At the moment when the woman was utterly devoured she opened her eyes and found she had become the lion and the two now lived as one. She escaped her pursuers.”

“Is that… a thing that happened?” At this point, nothing seemed impossible.

“It’s a story. No doubt you already know several others. Sacrifice and transformation. Tearing apart and then putting back together in a new form.”

“It’s familiar. Somehow.” She put aside the consideration for a moment as the feeling of her body started returning. It was definitely fingers again, not claws. She struggled up into a sitting position and let the spinning of the world stop. The cave was definitely chillier than she remembered it and the blanket wasn’t doing much. “Uh, Mattie? What happened to my clothes?”

She laughed. “I was wondering when you’d notice your spot of deshabille, Kitty. A side effect of metamorphosis, you know, clawmarks on those leather pants of yours. One size doesn’t quite fit all when panthers are involved. But have no fear! Semirah will provide you with our summer collection.”

Semirah appeared from wherever she had been lurking and gave her without a trace of embarrassment a loose short tunic of the same sort they wore to replace her own clothes, now ripped to shreds and buried at the bottom of the pit. She returned to her post occasionally stirring the simmering cauldron.

“My mother,” Carmilla managed after a while. “She was like me, wasn’t she?”

“Like us,” Mattie said. “Yes. She was a most remarkable lioness. A touch of red to her fur. She was very beautiful.”

“And my father?”

Mattie’s face twisted in amusement. “You know, I don’t think he even knew what he was getting into before the marriage. I believe it came as something of a shock when he found out about Lilita’s furry little secret. You weren’t born when he scurried off to wherever he went.”

“She was… she was targeted, wasn’t she?”

“Oh yes. A man called Vordenberg, a fanatic. He had names and addresses, Lady knows who from. He’s no longer a problem. It was a bit of a wake-up call, to be honest. The new museum up there,” she nodded to the dark passageway up to the surface, “was built on my advice. And with quite a lot of my money. It adds security, and of course allows certain of us to hang around a lot without raising suspicion.

“And you got me out after Maman died.”

“Yes. We didn’t know who else might be coming and you were not safe. But I knew you’d come back eventually. These things are deep in the blood. Ah,” she added and stood up to an approaching sound of shuffling, “I do believe it’s time.”

Coming out of the dark was a pair of women, neither of them familiar to Carmilla but both obviously expected. Mattie sprung up and danced forward to exchange kisses.

“Niobe. You look more radiant every year. And Aura, I’ve not seen you in-”

“-too long. Matska dear, it’s good to be back. It’s been a while since we’ve had a girls’ night.” Aura’s eyes flicked down to the mud coating Carmilla’s bare feet and shins and raised her eyebrows in a conspiratorial way.

Matties waved her over. “Kitty, stop skulking and come say hello. Niobe, Aura, Carmilla. Carmilla Karnstein,” she clarified.

Niobe, tall and high-cheekboned, looked blank until Aura elbowed her in the ribcage and muttered, _as in née Morgan_ , at which point lights went on behind her eyes.

“Oh, how do you do! I was wondering when you’d turn up. First time?” She cooed a bit and Aura gave Carmilla an understanding wink. “How lovely, you never forget it.”

“Find a place, girls.” Mattie was already looking past their shoulders at the next arrival. “Bernadette! Bernadette Delpastre, I have a bone to pick with you, you have not once come to the theatre this year.”

“Been away, Mats.” Bernadette had short spiky hair and quite a lot of piercings. She clasped hands with Mattie and then ushered forward a pair of shyer looking women who had followed her in and were hanging back. “Scotland. I brought some return visitors with me.”

“Danny Lawrence,” said the first, an exceptionally tall red-haired woman who Carmilla could have sworn she had seen somewhere recently. “This is Lyssa.”

Mattie performed a sort of slight but ceremonial bow with her fist on her chest, which was reciprocated, and Bernadette took Danny and Lyssa to the front of the cavern, pointing at various points on the ceiling and describing where they were in relation to the hills above. They looked around admiringly, but without surprise. Evidently this was a home away from home for them.

There were more who came, in dribs and drabs. Some Mattie greeted effusively or quietly, others just nodded and went to mill around on the cave floor. There didn’t seem much of a theme to the group save for them all being women. Some old, some young – although no children, nobody looking under about twenty. Most had on the same kind of loose tunics that Semirah and Marcela and now Carmilla were wearing, but there was also a scattering of floaty dresses and one rather nervous girl with a nose ring and a sort of robe. Carmilla put two and two together and understood that nobody was wearing anything that would take much time to remove.

“This is girl?” It was a heavyset old woman who spoke in a soft voice, someone on a scale simply larger than everyone else who didn’t need to raise her voice to be heard. Her long grey hair was loose around her shoulders and despite the mildness of the cave air she wore a big black fur cape stinking of musk and mould. She leaned on a long stick that was more than halfway to being a log.

“Madame Brauron.” Mattie lowered her head and then submitted to being pulled into a gruffly backslapping hug. “Carmilla, come meet one of our elders. How was your journey, Madame?”

“I hate flying. Small men shout to no purpose.” She turned her black eyes on Carmilla who had approached slowly. The eyes met and it was without a doubt the third woman from Mattie’s photograph, not obviously older today than thirteen years previously. She grunted approvingly, clapped Carmilla on the shoulder and then gave her an affectionate cuff round the cheek before stomping off to inspect the cauldron.

“Madame Brauron is not from our little local assembly,” Mattie explained. “But she is well known and respected here. I’m sure she’ll find something to complain about – it’ll make her happy.”

“Matska girl! Too much fennel, not enough laurel!”

“There we go,” she said quietly and then louder, “quite right Mama! Perhaps you should spend a little while talking to Semirah about it.”

“Mattie, I’m a little overwhelmed.”

“That’s understandable. Don’t worry, we’re nearly full,” she said as a few more drifted in ungreeted. The cavern had now maybe thirty or forty women gathered in groups of twos and threes. One tall woman came in, dressed in heavy boots and a sleeveless top. She threw down a rucksack at the chamber entrance and rooted around for more appropriate clothing to change into, presumably having wanted to blend in wherever she had come from.

“And Melanippe, good evening. Everything all right?”

“All sorted.” It was Mel, Carmilla realised, who she had interrupted cutting laurels in the hills. “I’m the last one, I’ve closed the gate up behind me. Turn around Karnstein, you can ogle me later.” 

Carmilla flushed and turned away. She had actually been staring in sudden unease at another familiar face that apparently knew who she was and had been waiting. Mel at least was unsurprised to find her here even if some of the others were less aware.

“Splendid,” said Mattie. “We’ll begin.” She clapped her hands and quietened the hubbub.

* * *

Laura went down the passage as quickly as she dared. The floor was slippy and once or twice she had to steady herself on the dripping wall. There was a murmuring down below, many voices talking quietly but echoing off the close walls and turning into a growling of the earth itself. She tried to step quietly but it was difficult with the uneven passage floor and sometimes she would find her foot missing the surface and hitting louder lower than she thought.

The floor flattened and she stuck to the wall as she let her eyes adjust to the space. It was a wide cavern with a smooth fairly even floor, lit by flaming torches along the walls and a great fire on a sort of dais at one side. A cauldron stood on a tripod to one side of the fire and there were dozens of people. She squinted and soon found Carmilla looking nervous. She had given up her leather jacket and ripped jeans and instead wore a loose tunic that was really quite covering but somehow didn’t look it.

This was not an obviously religious display to Laura’s mind, but then she supposed secret societies meeting in caves under the earth probably felt a little differently on the matter than did the seriously cardiganed women who walked past her flat every Sunday and pursed their lips when they saw Carmilla. That being said, special clothes did rather colour her opinion of Carmilla being in there. You heard things about cults, involving the words ‘free’ and ‘in common’ and that was all very well when it wasn’t her Carm.

Matska Belmonde moved through the crowd smoothly and came to the dais, Carm tagging along in her wake. Laura crouched down. Although the cavern itself was wide, the passage leading to it narrowed before it met the great hall and there was a sort of barrier coming out one side. She crept forward and flattened herself behind it. This was probably as close as she could get without being seen. There was movement amongst the women in the hall and they gathered around Mattie, who beckoned Carmilla to stand beside her as she spoke.

“Sisters, welcome. Thank you all for coming. We welcome tonight our newest sister, Carmilla Karnstein.” There was a vague hum of welcome. One woman nudged another. “It is also my good pleasure to welcome back Madame Helena Brauron who of course needs no introduction, and also two new guests from Scotland. We at Actée look forward to hearing all the news from our cousins in the north.” She inclined her head to a very tall pale woman and her short stocky companion.

That seemed to conclude the informal announcements because she moved forward to stand beside the fire and raised her hands, outstretched to the crowd gathered around her.

“The walls of the cave are the walls of time and eternity,” she said. It was not quite a chant, but her voice was no longer conversational. She was intoning, that was the word. “This is the space that waits for us and has waited for a hundred centuries and a hundred more centuries. We stand where we have stood and the distance is gone from between us.”

The crowd murmured, or hummed. It was a communal response, but Laura couldn’t work out the words.

“Ours is the inheritance of the taproot, the straight trunk in the midst of all the passing branches.”

The congregation buzzed its agreement.

“The icons of the world are on these walls and our souls are found within them. Ours is the doing of what has been done and what is always being done.”

Carmilla looked vaguely uncomfortable next to her, but also somehow excited.

“We are the lions of Cybele. We are those who cursed Actaeon, and we are his own transformation, and we are those who hunted him too. We are the death of Pentheus and those who offered him life. We are the inheritance of Zagreus and his betrayers also. We are the daughters of Kallisto and her death and her new life in the stars which are the painting on the cave of heaven.

“We are the punishment of Lycaon and the crime that he committed to deserve it and the one he killed and there is no distinction. We are the eaters and the eaten. We are the mouths.”

One by one the women were raising their hands.

“We are the enactment of sacrifice, the life and the death, the hunters and the hunted, the two-handed economy of transformation that turns the world.”

Quite unembarassed and yet with a definite flourish, her hands found the shoulder knots that tied her tunic and released them. The cloth dropped to the floor and she stepped naked out of them.

With everyone occupied at the far end, Laura chanced herself a little more. She poked her head out from the shelter of the rock to get a better look. There was something – there was something not quite right in the centre of the group. Mattie very suddenly wasn’t there anymore. The something that wasn’t right was cat-shaped, but much much larger than a housecat. A lionness. It was definitely a lioness and it walked unafraid amongst the unafraid women. Where had it come from? It sniffed the air and stretched out on the cavern floor.

Laura tore her eyes away from it and focused on the group of women again. Standing forward, in the place where Mattie had been, was a small woman with spiky hair. She, matter-of-fact, shrugged off her loose dress and raised her arms. Almost at once she fell to the floor, Carmilla jumping back from a flailing limb. The woman arched her back, stretched her arms and then she was not a woman at all but a cat, a leopard with dusty pale fur and smudged black spots. A snow leopard.

Laura blinked, squeezed her eyes shut and opened them in the confident expectation that this would prove to be a hallucination. The cat was still there when she opened them again, padding across the floor to allow another woman to throw off her clothes and transform into something like a lioness. She watched, still not believing her eyes, as one by one the women took on animal form.

They were cats mostly, although not entirely. Lionesses seemed to predominate, like the serried ranks of faces in the cave high above, but there were leopards too and one looked maybe like a jaguar though Laura wasn’t sure how to divide up all the species. Some were not cats. The very tall red-haired woman downed her bowl and shivered into the shape of a wolf, as did her companion. The great old woman sitting on the dais had barely even to shrug off her voluminous cloak as she was replaced effortlessly by a huge bear with fur a deep dark brown.

Laura strained her eyes. Carmilla was hovering next to Mel, unsure of what to do. She turned to her and said something. She nodded and closed her eyes. A word from Mel recalled her to something and although everything was red-orange in the firelight Laura could tell from the set of her head she was blushing. She shuffled out of the unaccustomed tunic only reluctantly and kept turned away from the others. There was a suggestion of Mel rolling her eyes. 

Carmilla was concentrating. The veins and tendons were standing out on her bare shoulders like they always did when something was assaulting her nerves. It didn’t look easy for her. She managed to fold herself in, curling her back like the others but the cat forced its way out of her body slowly and painfully. It was half a minute before a black panther stood where she had.

Laura stared uncomprehending. Carmilla had-. She had. Somehow it was less believeable when it was her girlfriend than some woman she’d never met and who smiled like the Cheshire Cat anyway. But Carmilla. Was this the final secret, the last layer of Carmilla’s walls that she had not yet brought down?

No, she realised. The nerves, the embarassment at her own nakedness. This was a new thing for Carmilla. And Mel had wanted her to see it, had wanted her not to have to explain and convince Laura when she got back. She felt a wave of gratitude to the woman for bringing her here.

* * *

Carmilla as panther took her bearings and walked a few steps around the cauldron. There was a new world in the cave now that the panic of her first transformation was failing, There were smells, a whole catalogue of the other creatures in the cavern with her. Lion, leopard, wolf – she stiffened, that last was not a good smell at first and took some getting used to. Bear as well, Madame Brauron contentedly running her claws through her fur. 

One of the lions twisted and turned and there was Matska Belmonde again. The surrounding beasts gathered round her, two curling up to lie at her feet like guardians. She raised her arms and there was silence in the cave of the lions.

“Come out, Laura Hollis.”


	9. Omophagia

Laura was frozen for a moment, but there was no sense in turning to run. That would be just as revealing of her presence as stepping out into the cavern. So she bit her lip and stood away from the projecting shoulder of rock that had hidden her. There was quiet in the cave for a moment. Lions, leopards, wolves, bear all looked at her. Women, too. They were all predators and that fact was pushing on her consciousness.

From out of the dark at the back, the black panther became Carmilla again. Laura’s eyes found hers and the other girl was as pale as Laura had ever seen her. There was unknowing fear on her face, dread that didn’t know what it was dreading.

“Good evening, Laura Hollis.” Mattie dropped off the dais and paced forward through the opening crowd. Every eye was on her, round pupils and slitted ones, brown eyes and blue and yellow and green glowing in the firelight. “Can you tell me how you came to be here this evening?”

She looked around, found her guide in human form and shot Mel a look. There was no worry in her face. “Mel brought me,” she said. A small nod was all the reaction she got from Mel herself.

Mattie beamed. “Did she _bring_ you? Or did she _invite_ you?” Behind her, Carmilla had come out of her frozen horror and was pushing forward to catch up with Mattie’s advance.

“Um. She invited me. I suppose.”

“You suppose.” Light glinted off her teeth. “You came freely. To see something you were not meant to see.”

She backed towards the passage upwards. “Yes.”

Carmilla reached Mattie and took her by the arm. “Mattie, what’s this about? What’s the problem?”

“The problem, darling, is that the cub reporter here has laid eyes on what she shouldn’t. The penalty for gazing upon the secrets is death. You know that, Carmilla. You know your myths.”

“Oh, come on! Mel brought her along.” Mel’s face was impassive and Mattie didn’t even turn to look at her. Carmilla understood something. “And you arranged that too, right? This is some charade. So you can-”

“It is _ceremony_ , darling. It is _ritual_. The steps of the dance are well established, and if some people are required to be ignorant for their participation – well, that’s just how it goes. Now if you could just stand aside while I kill little miss-”

Laura felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Carmilla looked desperately around. All the other women and beasts had formed a semi-circle behind Mattie. Carefully she moved to stand between Laura and the pack. “This is ceremony. Okay. So is she going to be ceremonially killed?”

“No, that part’s literal. So.” She rounded on Carmilla. “Are you going to join us? Your mother’s inheritance?”

“What?”

“You can lead the kill. And then-”

“Stop. Did you-? Did you really, for _one moment_ , did you think that was going to be a possible choice? Was this going to be your big dilemma – my mother’s fucking _pet sanctuary_ versus Laura?” Carmilla stared at Mattie in disgust and contempt. “You don’t know me half as well as you’d like to pretend. And you can go to hell for just suggesting it.”

“Very well.” A ripple passed over her face and her jaw started reforming itself.

Panic. “Oh God. Laura. Laura, run!” 

“Carm-” She tried to take Carmilla’s hand, but she shook it off.

“I know. Run.” She bent double as if being sick and her skull crumped around her. Fangs and fur sprouted, her claws found purchase on the ground. Behind her she could hear Laura’s footsteps up stumbling as fast as possible up the passage. She as panther faced Mattie-as-lion and snarled.

Even if she could beat Mattie she was hopelessly outnumbered. And even if she hadn’t been, Mattie was bigger and stronger and older and knew how to fight with teeth and claws. Carmilla was barely beginning to get used to this new body. She waited for the sound of Laura’s flight to disappear behind her and then she sprung.

They collided and the battle was instinctual rather than calculated. Mattie was larger but Carmilla had an agility and a flexibility she lacked. She managed to escape twice a bite from her fangs and rolled away from the devouring mouth. Her claws raked Mattie’s belly but the blood was superficial. The lion batted her down, and then again. Finally she seemed to tire of the game. Her mouth opened in an ear-splitting roar and then Mattie simply knocked Carmilla down, fastened her teeth around the scruff off her neck and half-dragged, half-threw her to one side. The word shuddered and she lost her bearings.

* * *

Laura crashed into the gate at the top of the passage, praying that Mel had only shut and not locked it. Her luck held and it shrieked on its hinges as she opened. And then there was only plausible escape route – through the cave of hands and the cave of lions and then the way out to the hillside and the museum. It should have been obvious, but the realisation that it _was_ obvious had her wondering about a bluff. There were places to hide in caves, mud and water that might overwhelm even a hunter’s sense of smell. Out on the hills, though, it was openness. But possibly an openness with cars. She went right and the came out into the circle of lions in stone.

Behind her was an scream and a howl and she shoved the horror to the back of her mind and ran. Through the darkness, over the sand-covered cavern floor, over the resounding metal walkway and out into the fenced enclosure around the cave entrance. The door through the fence here was locked and she wildly rattled the handle before turning to the museum itself. The back door was locked as well, but it was not a tall building and it had drainpipes. She swung herself on and scrambled up.

The roof was quite flat, a long slow incline to avoid interrupting the landscape. She sprinted over it and was almost at the other side when noise from the cave mouth heralded the arrival of the hunters. Her heart clenched with what might have happened to Carmilla but she pushed the thought away. The grumbling growl of a lioness and then human voices talking.

The roof would be no refuge - even if it there had not been climbing leopards amongst them, the hunters could simply have become women again. She shuffled down the drainpipe on the other side, falling into the carpark at the same time as the side gate creaked open. It was only her who had not had a key. Gravel scratched her hands.

The path across the hills was steep. In the circumstances she preferred the road – a longer distance to town but with more of a chance of coming across a car. She looked back long enough to see the pack spreading out a hundred yards away and ran.

* * *

Carmilla shook herself back to awareness. The great hall was empty around her and what sound there was came as a vague echoing from above up the passage, too distorted to hear anything specific. She twisted her head, trying to shake the grogginess out of it. Thoughts started firing again. Alone: the pack was gone a-hunting. She scrambled to her feet before remembering she had better ones to rely on. She left the cave as a panther.

The scents of the pack, and even of Laura buried underneath, hung in the passageway air. She ran as fast as she could, able to see the uneveness of the floor with only the slightest amount of light. Her slitted pupils opened wide. She followed the trail without hesitation.

Out the cave mouth, through the open gate and onto the starry hillside. The mild night air on her tongue was like memory but she ignored the resin and thyme and instead followed the sweat and fur, the stink of bear and the scent of Laura that even as a cat was so familiar.

She was taking the road and the pack hung back. Carmilla could see why – blind corners in this hilly landscape, sharp bumps in the road. If a truck came up suddenly from behind even a giant cave lion would regret the collision and a stampede would allow nobody the chance to escape. For a moment the wild hope shot up that Laura would get away but then she saw the flankers. The two wolves and some of the others were pushing ahead on the right and Laura hadn’t seemn them. They got ahead of her and down the hill they came. They would block her path, force her off the road and close the net around her. 

Carmilla let the panic push her forward. The pack was herding Laura up a small knoll a hundred yards or so from the road. She didn’t look back, kept on going determinedly. Towards the rear Mattie stood woman-shaped on a jutting rock and keened a cry to send the hunters in for the kill. Her hair flung out wild from her head in the night breeze.

“Mattie, stop this. Mattie, this is _murder!_ ”

“This is sacrifice, darling. From the beginning to the end of the world, this is the only thing that has ever really happened.” 

The hunters closed in. They had got around her and Laura was at bay. Carmilla pushed and ran, refusing panther form so that Laura could see her face coming towards her behind the pack. There was terror on the girl’s face and she looked from animal to animal. A lion who might have been Mel was in the fore, and the wolf that had been the red-haired visitor, and two others with them. The rest followed. Carmilla’s bare human feet bled on the sharp stone and branches but Laura’s terrified eyes met hers and she would not change form.

They struck. Laura had no time even to open her mouth. They bit, fastened on limbs and tore. She came apart under their teeth. Their muzzles were red, they ripped and broke apart and tossed like fragments of a rag doll.

* * *

Carmilla’s head swam back into life. She was on the floor of the great hall again. There were feet and legs and paws in her line of sight. She pulled herself up to sit. 

The cauldron was bloody; the sides were streaked red. She felt sick. There was a great numbness in her heart and the air smelled foul. Around her and the obscene cauldron the hunters formed a circle. Semirah was in front of her, squatting in the mud, her delicate face smeared with blood and her black hair lank about her head. She stank of the kill and of sweat.

“Awake, Carmilla?” Mattie smiled down on her as if nothing were amiss. No such mess on her fastidious face, she had even chosen to dress again. 

Carmilla said nothing. She tried to steady her fogged head and plant her limbs firmly on the ground. Mattie took a bowl and dipped it into the cauldron. The liquid was a bright red now, the wine and herb smell mixed with something else. Things floated in it.

Carmilla sprung straight for Mattie’s throat, not even bothering to change form. But Mattie simply batted her off, one blow across her chest crumpling her down to the floor again. She crawled a few yards away to near where the red-headed Danny curled her long legs around her wolf-formed friend.

“Sit tight, Milla.” Mattie spoke casually, as if this were a dull but necessary social event. “We haven’t finished yet.”

“Oh, you’re finished. Or I am, one way or the other. Why don’t you just kill me now?”

“That would hardly be to the point, dear. After all, you’re our sister.”

“I am not your sister.”

“Hmm. I hope you’ll change your mind. Or dear sweet Laura will have died for nothing.” She turned around to survey the pack. Mel stood up tall almost out of the firelight. A trail of dark dried stains ran down between her bare breasts and was spattered over her midriff. 

“I was first to bite,” she said. Mattie inclined her head in acceptance and she came forward.

“Take this and drink of it, for this is life broken for you.”

Carmilla watched numbly at Mel joined her at the cauldron and took the offered bowl. She dipped it in the obscene mixture and swallowed a mouthful. The residue in the bowl she cast to the floor. The smell of blood, wine and herbs arose. A few barley grains glinted in the light and Carmilla hoped they were really barley grains.

Others were coming forward, blocking Carmilla off from the cauldron. They all came to drink as women, all from the same bowl. It dripped and splashed. It was a vampiric scene, a scene of butchery. Niobe swallowed only the smallest mouthful before raising it up and tipping the rest over her head with every sign of satisfaction. She smeared the foul liquid down over her neck and shoulders, something from a nightmare. Aura, her companion, kissed her lips like that and Carmilla’s stomach heaved but could not expel the image.

There was a woman of middle age at the cauldron now. She was not old from the front, but as she turned in profile the wavering firelight threw the wrinkles leading back from her eyes into relief. She dipped her head, downed her bowl smoothly and looked around with satisfaction. She smiled at Mattie and suddenly her wrinkles were gone. Despite herself, Carmilla stared.

Madame Brauron limped up. Her white hair hung around her shoulders, unbloodied. She had seemed content to let the younger creatures pursue the kill but she still claimed her share of the blood. Mattie gave her the bowl and her black eyes met Carmilla’s without expression before she drank greedily. When she lowered it again there were unmistakeable streaks of black in her hair and she no longer looked more than maybe her late fifties.

It all made horrific sense to Carmilla. The pack had largely finished now and Mattie served the penultimate bowl to Semirah and then took one herself. She drank daintily and dabbed at a spot on her lower lip afterwards. Finally she dipped it one last time and held it outwards to Carmilla.

“Your turn, Kitty.”

Carmilla shook her head.

“Come along. We’ve all partaken. You would not want to be left out, or you would not be Lilita Morgan’s daughter.”

“I don’t want to be my mother’s daughter. Not like this.”

“Very well. You may regret this.” Mattie dropped the bowl on the floor, splashing blood over the stone and her feet. She turned to the pack, a room of naked women with blood coating their mouths, matting their hair, buried under their nails, coating their bodies.

“Remember this! Remember Laura Hollis, who gave her life for you. Remember that life will have its sacrifices and to die is to rise again.”

“We remember.”

“Remember that we are one flesh. She with you, now, in your flesh. You with her, now, in the cauldron.” Casually, without hesitation, she picked up from the floor a sickle and cut into the palm of her hand.

“We remember.”

Mattie leaned over the cauldron and thrust her arm in up to the shoulder. From it she drew out the heart and raised it up over the assembly. Her own bleeding hand lets its blood mingle with Laura’s.

“Now get up and walk.” She let it drop. Carmilla tried not to hear the sound of it landing.

There was a general crowding forward. Everyone’s attention was fixed on the cauldron which suddenly resounded as if struck. A murmur of satisfaction. The crash came again and then again and Carmilla shrieked in shock as a hand shot up out of the gore to take hold of the rim.

Instantly Mattie was behind her, hand gripping Carmilla’s shoulder painfully before she could spring forward. “Not yet, Carmilla.”

She had no reason to trust the woman but she held back. The hand dropped and when it came up again there were two, grasping opposite sides. 

Slowly, agonisingly, death running sheets off her limbs, Laura stood up in the cauldron. She opened her eyes and Mattie’s hand on Carmilla’s shoulder released her. She pushed forward, shoving aside the unresisting crowd and shouted Laura’s name. Her arms were open and Carmilla threw herself on the bloodstained body which lived again. Her weight dragged Laura out of the cauldron and it toppled over, spilling the wine and blood mixture over the stone. Laura lay in the ruin, breath dragging out of her raggedly and Carmilla frantically trying to do she knew not what.

She bucked and spat, emptied out the blood from her lungs and stomach. Slowly she opened her eyes. They focused on Carmilla but spasms took her almost at once, shaking Laura’s small body until in one great wrench, her spine broke and the reformation of her flesh began. She went through it quickly, her new claws tearing into Carmilla’s arms before she had a chance to let go. The cat bursting out of her tore her newly regrown flesh, carved great rips in it that healed instantly into the shape of a puma. Then, just as quickly, she shuddered back into human form. Carmilla was past surprise and simply clung on.

Finally she stood. Even in the circle of bloody creatures she stood out. Carmilla stood beside her protectively, waiting for an attack that never came. Laura was shockingly calm but allowed herself to be guided as if she were sleepwalking. The congregation parted around them, one by one drawing back – some with a nod or even a small curtsey. Madame Brauron clapped her on the shoulder, but Carmilla brushed her off. They held each other’s hands until they were in clear space and then Laura changed. It was a smooth transformation this time, her body flowing easily into the form of a cat not much smaller than Carmilla’s own shape but tawny brown instead of black. 

They went up the passageway and into the open caves. The scent of the air on the hillside penetrated even the damp underground and the stench of blood, and the air was cool. Outside at the bottom of the hill was the shallow stony river and they washed the blood off until they were clean, or as clean as they could be.

Laura found her voice at last. 

“So you’re a giant black cat, huh?”


	10. Mysterion

Their normal cafe was quieter now that it was late enough for most people to have started on their days, but this suited them with no complaints. They sat out in the sunny street. Carmilla’s glance darted around, staring at the faces of ordinary women drinking coffee and trying to recognise them or not. 

“Carm, if you’re not going to eat that I will.” Laura regarded her sternly over the assortment of pastries which was twice what she would normally consume. “I don’t know why you ordered it all.”

“I need a bigger breakfast!” she protested. “I had a... very tiring night.” In truth she was ravenous and if this had been England she would have pressed for something large and fried. Bacon and sausages and black pudding, all in great piles.

“Yeah, but did you die?” Carmilla flinched at the question but Laura just laughed. “No suffering Olympics, Carm, I’m going to win every time. You’ll have to wait on me hand and foot till I feel recovered.” She looked pleased at the prospect.

“Oh really?”

“Absolutely. I’m going to be very, very demanding.” Her eyebrows were raised and her smile was peeking out again. She was, Carmilla reflected, taking it all very well. But then if anyone could die and pick up again as if nothing had happened, that someone was Laura Hollis. She glanced down – not quite as if nothing had happened, though.

“Hey, that was it!” Laura talked through a pastry as a memory filtered in. “I remembered something I wanted to say to you: Paris. We should go to Paris next time.”

Carmilla paused. “Next time?”

“Next time we take a holiday together. I like France.” She took a bite of croissant. “But a city break next, maybe? We can get a crappy apartment and read Simone de Beauvoir. Well, you can. I’ll eat chocolate croissants.” 

Carmilla liked the sound of ‘next time’. She had been unsure there for a while. The chatter went on, largely one sided. It was incredible how the girl could do it. 

A shadow fell over the table.

“Leave now,” Carmilla said to the new arrival. “Before I feed you your own spleen.”

Mattie mimed sadness. “Oh, Kitty. Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

“I will hunt, torture and kill you.” She spat the threat out through clenched teeth. Laura laid a calming hand on her arm.

“Manners, darling. And not with that fork, it’s for pastries.” Mattie sighed and drew up an extra chair. “Why, your own mother tore my heart out and ate it, but did I let that ruin our friendship? I did not. She actually saved a bit for me to keep, which was odd but charming.” Her hand found the silver locket lying on her chest.

“And it may have escaped your notice, but you kept a whole fucking finger.” Carmilla grabbed Laura’s left hand with its bandaged stump where the little finger had been and shoved it in front of Mattie’s face.

She made a face. “Ah. I did wonder. But Kitty, I warned you that you’d regret not drinking. Some things are better not left slightly incomplete. But it could have been a lot worse, so chin up.”

“You could have said,” Carmilla said after sulking for a moment.

“Because you were in such a mood to believe me.”

There seemed no obvious reply to that. The lack of words widened and deepened. Unbidden, the waiter brought Mattie her normal order.

“My mother killed you?” Carmilla asked at last, when the silence had gone on for a bit and Mattie showed no sign of leaving.

“Oh yes. And I was grateful, unlike some.” A flash of white teeth in Laura’s direction. “I was already thirty years old, you know – people were starting to talk about why I hadn’t married. Lilita really did offer some exciting new possibilities.”

Carmilla thought back to Mattie’s face in the photograph taken fifteen years ago. “You can’t be-”

“You should never ask a lady her age, Milla. All women in polite society are thirty-five and remain so until proven otherwise.”

“The old woman. In the cave, when she drank- well.” Carmilla shifted a bit closer to Laura. “She was younger.”

“Ah, yes. The blood is the life, as I’m sure a literary girl like you knows. Not infallibly, not perfectly, and not forever of course.” She sighed and actually looked mildly regretful. “Dear Madam Brauron is slowly down a bit of late, I’ve noticed. But that’s in the nature of things. She’s my grandmother, you know, in an odd adoptive kind of way. Yours too, a bit more directly.” 

Carmilla let that sink in, Mattie’s eyes on her, but she put it to the back of her mind for now. “Mattie, what are we?”

“Us? I was under the impression you didn’t want there to be an ‘us’, Milla.” She laughed at Carmilla’s discomfort at the barb. “Oh, what are any of us? Really? Shadows on the wall of the cave if you like your Plato.”

“I don’t, actually. Boring.”

“Hmm. He was overkeen on leaving caves for my taste, I’ll admit. What do you want, Kitty? Some neat name to pin on meanings that were old before your home even poked out of the ice sheets? Don’t bother.” She sighed in the face of their staring. “Oh, you know how it goes:

“ _By blood we live, the hot the cold_  
 _To ravage and redeem the world_  
 _There is no bloodless myth will hold._

“People know. At some basic level, this is our inheritance and we see it everywhere. Life will have its sacrifices. Every culture in the world has known it since there was culture. Even over there,” she nodded a head to the church over the square with closed doors, “they drink blood for eternal life. Smart people. The torn flayed saviour who is victim and redeemer. Werewolf tales, vampire tales.”

“They were the same until recently,” put in Laura Hollis, pop culture expert. “Vampires and werewolves. Dracula could turn into a wolf.”

“There you are. Someone spotted something in that respect, I think. Drink this blood and live forever, pass the initiation on. We all have the echo of this need, whatever this is, deep down. In some families it runs strong and only needs a little nudge to awaken it.” She tapped Carmilla’s shoulder and she didn’t flinch. “And in others something more drastic is needed for the soul to remember. In most people it’s buried so deep that not even the sacrifice will reveal it.”

Carmilla was looking at her thoughtfully, but suddenly her face darkened as a thought occurred. “You mean you didn’t _know_?” she said, all at once outraged. “You didn’t know Laura would-”

“Oh, relax. I was reasonably sure. You get a sense for it after a while. You, for instance, stood out like a sore thumb. Even if I hadn’t recognised you, somebody would have picked you up for sure. Are you staying long?”

“We’re going home today. Changed our flights. Sherman and and I are going to have words enough when he sees Laura with nine fingers - not ‘fessing up to it straight away would probably be the end of me.”

“When you come back-” she began.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to come back. I’m not going to forgive you, not in a hundred years.” Mattie seemed to find this amusing more than anything else.

“You say that now. I’ve got time.” She stood up, stretched, and began to walk away. Over her shoulder she added, “So have you, if you want it. And so has she now.”

* * *

An excerpt from the acknowledgments of _To Ravage and Redeem the World: the Endurance of Greek Mythology as Evidence of Innate Human Tendencies_ , a PhD thesis submitted to the University of York by Carmilla Karnstein:

_My research could not have been completed without the constant love and support of my fiancée Laura. To her I owe everything, including the first and better part of the title. An additional debt is also owed to my sister Matska Belmonde, whom I have still not quite forgiven for introducing me to certain key insights._

_This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my mother. I have not forgotten her, nor the inheritance she left me._


End file.
